A complete guide to open-ended survey questions

To get the most out of your survey, you need to include open-ended survey questions, and here’s why:

Closed end questions limit you just to the range of answers you can think of up front. This is fine for simple questions (yes/no, rating scales, etc...) but things get tricky when trying to understand more complex opinions.

This article provides you with a complete guide to open-ended survey questions, including what open-ended questions are, why you should use them, and how to analyse your open-ended survey results. This will help you weigh up when to use them, and when to use closed-ended questions instead.

What are open-ended survey questions?

Open-ended questions allows a survey respondent to give an answer without restriction. In this sense, they are truly open-ended, unlike closed questions which restrict answers to a set list of pre-defined responses.

A basic example is:

"What did you enjoy most about your visit?"

Here, the respondent is free to name anything that they enjoyed rather than being forced to pick from a pre-defined list. This can provide a richness and depth that closed-ended questions cannot give, as well as insight into emotions and in-depth descriptions of events or customer experiences that are hard to pre-empt.

Often, open-ended survey questions are paired with closed questions and to provide a "why?" follow-up answer. For example, we might first ask a closed question,

How would you rate the service of [X]?

Then, for anyone who rates the service as "poor", we could ask a follow-up open question:

“Why do you say the service you received was poor?”

How to ask open-ended survey questions

Here are the key considerations when writing open-ended questions:

• Keep your questions specific and clear, without leading the respondent.
• Avoid asking two questions in one such as “what did you like or dislike about the restaurant?”. Ultimately, your question should be unambiguous, and always in clear, simple language that the respondent/customer will understand.
• Think about the technicalities. Set your character count high to avoid your respondents being half-way though and prevented from continuing.
• Respondents should be free to write a full answer if they wish. Sometimes you might frame the question, say, to list the top three reasons for / benefits of [X], both to encourage those writing too little and too much.
• Include a “what else?” after the main question to encourage more response.

Open-ended vs closed ended questions: how to decide which?

Open-ended and closed questions each have strengths and weaknesses. Here are some questions to consider when choosing between the two:

• Do you know all the possible responses that could be given to a question? They may be predetermined and finite, such as demographics, employment status or behavioural questions.
• Are you seeking opinion on a scale, e.g. from 1-10 or from very unsatisfied to very satisfied?
• Do you need to limit focus on a specific issue, e.g. brand attributes, ad campaign or product feature?

If the answer is “yes” then most likely you should use a closed-ended question. Examples of closed-ended questions can be found in the next section, and include demographics questions such as age, gender, employment status, numeric questions, scale (also known as ordinal) questions and the simple, classic ‘Yes/No’ response. Consider including a ‘Don’t know’ or ‘Not applicable’ code to avoid forcing a response.

Ensure your questionnaire is balanced overall to avoid respondent fatigue.

Too many open-ended questions will be off putting, and people will stop giving answers, too few and customers will feel like they weren’t given an opportunity to give the feedback they wished.

Other ‘specify’ questions

This question type lies between a closed question and an open-ended one. It provides a pre-defined list of responses plus the option to choose ‘other’ and type in a response not included in the list. This type of question works well when a comprehensive list of responses cannot be pre-defined. It avoids leaving the respondent feeling frustrated if their response is not included in the closed list.

Examples of closed-ended and open-ended survey questions

Here are five open-ended question ideas and five closed-ended examples to get you started.

Open-ended question examples

Closed-ended question examples

How to analyse open-ended questions?

Given the wide-ranging and varied responses you will collect from an open question, you will need a way to categorise and quantify the responses in order to analyse them.

Coding is a method of categorising each response in a structured way so the themes they express can be grouped, counted and analysed.

You should think about this step early in your planning, to ensure you have a clear idea of how and when you will process the responses collected. For example, with the right tools in place, you can begin the process of coding in parallel with your data collection, rather than causing delay by waiting until the end of fieldwork.

Our software, codeit, is a dedicated tool that speeds up coding through the use of text analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Sign up for a 30 day free trial to help you start coding and analysing your open-ended question data.

Key things to remember

When deciding whether to include open-ended questions in your survey, or when a closed-ended question could be better, use this simple checklist alongside this guide to get the best conclusions to your business questions within your budget:

1. Write out your topics and questions and then use this guide to choose which question type – closed or open – is available or appropriate
2. Balance the wish to get quick/easy-to-analyse closed-ended answers with the depth that open-ended responses will bring, using at least 2-3 open-ended questions where they can bring the most value to your survey.
3. Sense check your survey by completing it yourself to make sure it’s not only clear but enjoyable for the respondent.
4. Have an (analysis) plan. Have a plan, not just for writing and launching your survey with open-ended questions, but what you are going to do with the data. Ensure you know how you are going to code your answers and perform your analysis. Receiving a large amount of verbatim answers can be overwhelming and without the right processes in place, you will waste the rich data source you have just collected.

Once you’ve completed steps 1-4, codeit offers a 30 day free trial to help you start coding and analysing your open-ended question data.