Good open-ended questions and thoughtful responses to these questions can yield amazingly rich and insightful data. But given the generally poor quality of responses to open-ended question in mail surveys, some have speculated that open-ended questions in online surveys would suffer a similar fate.
Research seems to show this is not the case. Further, a study just published in the Summer 2009 issue of Public Opinion Quarterly outlines three ways that we can improve the quality of responses in on-line surveys: