ABSTRACT

Open-ended questions consist of asking for an opinion or a comment about something and allowing a spontaneous answer. Participants provide a free answer, without the need of adjusting to preformed phrases or a list of words. Asking for information in this way has long been used (Woodward and Franzen 1948), and it is still used in different areas, such as medical studies (Carson et al. 2011; Hanson et al. 2011), political and social sciences (Geer 1991; Jordan-Zachery and Seltzer 2012), and marketing (Heath and Chatzidakis 2012).