New research shared in Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation (PARE) tackles a key challenge in survey research: how to draw reliable, population-level conclusions from open-ended responses. Westat’s Emily Diaz, PhD, a Senior Research Associate for Education and Social Policy, is the lead author of the article, “Increasing the Generalizability of Open-Ended Survey Item Responses.”
Open-ended responses can offer rich, unanticipated insights; however, their text-based nature makes them difficult to analyze and generalize, especially when a higher respondent burden leads to more skipped questions. To address this, the authors present a practical method for coding open-ended responses into numerical data and applying survey weights to improve representativeness. Demonstrated in a stratified random sample with nonresponse, the approach helps account for bias while preserving the value of qualitative data.
This work provides guidance for researchers and evaluators, enabling more rigorous and generalizable use of open-ended survey findings and bridging the gap between qualitative insight and quantitative inference.