Imagine this: you're twenty questions deep into a survey on soap. After looking through multiple colors, packaging options, shapes, scents, and ingredients, selecting your favorite hygiene habits and practices, and learning more about soap than you ever cared to learn, you come across it: "Please describe your thoughts on this product." There are no multiple answers, scale, or range of likely to unlikely. No, this is the appearance of the dreaded open-ended question.

You may be tempted to treat this question as if it didn't exist. Throw in a simple N/A, a 'yes' or 'no,' or random keyboard gibberish. While this would save you the time and effort of filling out the overwhelmingly empty box, it is important to know that these open ends are usually the most important questions in the whole survey.

What Is An Open-End?

Chances are you already know exactly what an open-end is. Since middle school, tests and surveys have asked you to explain why you chose certain answers, to describe your thoughts and feelings, and to go into a painful amount of detail about your reasoning. If you managed to avoid these questions (or ignored them), an open-ended question is defined as a question that, if asked correctly, cannot be answered with a 'yes,' 'no,' or any other static response. Contrarily, closed-end questions can be answered 'yes' or 'no' or with a much shorter answer.

For example, asking, "Do you like this product?" would be a closed-ended question. The clear answers here are "yes" or "no," or perhaps some other form of these answers. A follow-up question such as "Why do you like this product?" would count as an open-ended question. However, this is not a very well-written open end. It is vague and does not require much more than a simple answer. Technically, you could write "because I do," and the question would have a fully complete answer. A much better open-end would be more specific and require a more thoughtful reply, such as "What about the shape of this product do you like?" or "If you could change one thing about this product, what would it be?"

Why Are They Important?

It is usually this need for a lengthy, detailed answer that makes open-ended questions a pain to answer and deal with. It takes time, effort, and sometimes deep thought to come up with a suitable answer to these questions. Thus, many people try to skip them altogether. However, it is these sorts of questions that are the most important to the survey.

Multiple choice questions and sliders can only get a general idea of what consumers as a group like. This is a quantitative, or numbers-heavy, approach: how many people like the product vs how many don't. However, the real meat of the question lies in the qualitative or psychological approach. While both quantitative and qualitative research are important, qualitative research helps understand individual thoughts, emotions, and motivations better than quantitative. Open-ended questions that ask for your thoughts and feelings are the bread and butter of qualitative research.

Open-ends help researchers understand the why, not just the how. By better understanding how individuals feel about specific products and services, the researcher can better understand what matters most to consumers. If every consumer loves the product's shape, the company will know to keep making the product in that shape. However, it is much better to understand why customers like the specific shape, why they prefer it to other shapes, and why the product's shape even matters. Knowing the answers to all of these questions will help the companies make more informed decisions on not just this product but all other products in the present and future.

How to Respond to Open-Ends

Because open-ended questions are so important, it is essential to put effort into them. Even though it takes a lot of time, effort, and introspection to answer them, it is precisely that time, effort, and introspection that is so important to researchers. Thus, you should always thoughtfully and carefully consider your answer to open-ended questions. Take your time: as stated before, this is the most important part of the survey. While skipping it wouldn't discount the rest of the work you had done up to that point, it certainly would help the researchers behind the survey a lot more if they were presented with well-thought-out answers to their questions.

In a similar vein, "less is more" is not usually true when it comes to open-ends. The more you can describe your thoughts and feelings on a product or service and answer the 'why' of the question, the more information you will be presenting to the researchers. This information, whether that be positive or even negative, then gets translated into the changes you wish to see. If you don't go into detail on why you like or dislike something, there's only so much the companies can guess, and odds are you'll end up with a product you don't love.

Ultimately, how you answer an open-ended question is up to you. You can write out a long analysis of your feelings about the product, or you can write a few short responses and move on. However, American Consumer Opinion encourages you to practice the former. It helps researchers like us better understand consumers like you and helps us help companies make decisions that are best for everyone. And remember, there's no need to become a novelist: a few well-written sentences will go a long way.