Beginner’s guide to design questionnaires: When is better to use open or close questions?

Núria Isart
Aug 22, 2017 · 2 min read

Questionnaire is a research tool that help us to gather information from respondents. There’s many people who think its easier to build one, but there are subtleties that you must take into account not to condition the user during they responses.

In questionnaires, depending on the type of data you want to obtain –factual data or opinions-, you can ask questions in two different ways: open questions and close questions. Each one has a different purpose and its used to obtain a specific type of information.

Open questions give the respondent the freedom to decide what to fill in. Its main benefits are:

  1. It enables to grasp the full richness of people’s interviews. The respondents expressed in their own words and you can obtain other qualitative aspects of expressions (ways to refer to a specific topic for example).
  2. It needs less time in preparation because you don’t have to think in depth the possible answers or pre-coded previously.
  3. It’s useful for questions with a wide range of possible answer that a close question would be counterproductive.

But also have shortcomings:

  1. It requires more effort that close questions for respondents to answer. They need more time to prepare the response.
  2. For researchers, the responses are harder to analyze because there are a wide range of results or possible answers and the time to obtain conclusions of this questions is higher.

Otherwise, close questions force the respondent to choose between the answers provided. This, has the advantages that:

  1. Responses can be more quickly analyzed. The researchers just need to count how many answers A, B or C they have so in less time they can make a graph or other things to present the results.
  2. It also save time to respondents to answer because you give them all the answers so they just need to read them and choose the one that fits better with his opinion or facts.

But also has disadvantages:

  1. It takes longer to design than open questions because you have to take into account all the possibilities and elaborate all the pre-coded answers. You have to be very precise and careful because if the respondents don’t find the pre-defined response that match with his answer it can cause frustration.
  2. It can produce a precipitate effect in respondents to answer quickly without thinking much about their responses.
  3. It is possible to be conditioned for putting answers into respondents’ minds that they might not otherwise have come up with.

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Núria Isart

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