Eliciting People’s First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

Comparing traditionally structured survey questions vs. the benefits of open-ended survey questions combined with text analysis to allow a wider range of responses.

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Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA

by Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva Open-ended survey questions offer the potential to elicit people’s first-order considerations on policy issues. By not constraining respondents to a given set of answer choices, they avoid priming them to think of otherwise non-salient options or omitting relevant options. Open-ended questions can range from broader to more targeted. Leveraging recent advances in text analysis, their answers can be visualized and quantitatively studied to shed light across many areas of economics.