Conferences

Self-administered public health questionnaires have, in Sweden, a long tradition as important means of monitoring populations’ health. During the last decade the design has been developed in collaboration with experts in qualitative methodology. Rather extensive open-ended questions and follow-up telephone interviews have been added to the traditional questionnaires. The purpose was, initially, to assure that all respondents could give correct and fair descriptions of their health problems. The open-ended questions were inspired by the way questions are asked in qualitative interviews and the way the researcher shows interest in what the informant has to say. In the first trials it was unclear how respondents would react to these questions. Survey literature often recommends avoidance of open-ended questions with the arguments that people don’t want to answer open-ended questions or that it is a too burdensome task for many respondents.

This presentation is based on experiences from five different surveys during the years 2002-2008, where different designs have been used. It might shed some new light on some of these “truths”, i.e. do the respondents want to and have the ability to answer open-ended questions? What types of open-ended questions have been most successful, in terms of data quality and response rates? What are the pros and cons of using open questions from the respondents’ perspective?

The presentation will focus on what we have learned so far about the respondents’ reactions to open-ended questions and invitations to follow-up interviews. The presentation will also show examples on the usefulness of combining qualitative and quantitative methods for the interpretation of survey results.