A Dissertation by GRACE HUI-CHIN LIN Submitted to the Office of ...

Open-ended Questions
In order to attain a high credibility, this study applied open-ended questions.
Schuman and Presser (1996) mentioned the advantage of “open-end questions”: “the
superiority of open questions is inherent in the form, and cannot be provided through
any pre-coded set of alternatives” (p. 81). Additionally, “Open-ended questions can
also yield useful information, especially when researchers need to explore complex
issues that do not have a finite or predetermined set of responses” (Carey, Morgan &
Oxtoby, 1996, p. 1). Therefore, five broad questions in this study were designed to
investigate the researched phenomena from the learners’ eyes, but not from the
researchers’ and teachers’ professional views.
Patton (1990) also argued that simpler open-ended questions elicited the
participants’ feelings, thoughts and experiences:
Indeed, in qualitative inquiry, one of the things the evaluator is trying to
determine is what dimensions, themes, and images/words people use among
themselves to describe their feelings, thoughts, and experiences. For example,
then, of truly open-ended questions would take the following format: How do
you feel about the program? (p. 296).
Accordingly, five open-ended questions were designed for this study to draw
forth multiple dimensions of responses. These open-ended questions were in a similar
uncomplicated format, such as, “What do you perceive in learning the
communication strategy?”
According to Patton (1990), “The truly open-ended question permits persons
being interviewed to take whatever direction and use whatever words they want in
order to represent what they have to say” (p. 297). Consequently, this study used
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