Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

ASKING AND RECORDING QUESTIONS 155
question comes more or less out of the blue, the respondents’
thoughts will not be organized and may emerge somewhat haphazardly
and in a confused fashion.
What is reported first is sometimes taken by investigators to
indicate the saliency of issues or the importance of things to the
respondents. We would caution against such interpretations, however.
Many aspects of the questioning process, including especially
the preceding questions, affect what is easily accessible cognitively
and likely to be reported first. The order in which things are reported
may be more a function of the interview situation than a
characteristic of the respondent. See the discussion of context
effects in Chapter Four for a fuller discussion.
Uncovering Key Insights from Open-Ended Questions
Often valuable information is overlooked in answers to open-ended
questions. In some cases, researchers may dismiss any comments
that conflict with their own analysis of the issues.
In other cases, researchers may pay attention only to the most
commonly mentioned open-ended answers and not to the unique
ones. One advantage of open-ended questions is that they can
uncover uncommon but intelligent opinions of which the surveyor
would otherwise have remained unaware. If surveyors focus only on
frequent responses, they will continue to be unaware of these ideas.
Of course, the most frequent responses to open-ended questions
are also valuable. When evaluating service satisfaction, for
instance, open-ended questions often point to the service issues
that are most important to customers. Although customers might
rate a number of service aspects as low or as high, it will be the
vehement comments or the effusive ones that will show what’s
really important to them.
Improving the Quality of Open-Ended Questions
For respondents to provide meaningful answers of the sort that justify
the expense of using open-ended questions, they must be given