There’s an established way of correcting for this in market research (and other fields): coding. Let’s say you have the following list:
utilitarian
deontologist
virtue ethics
other (please specify)
Then you have someone go through all the typed-in responses, and when someone types in “special snowflake utilitarian” you code that as a 1 rather than a 4.
This is also done for completely open-end responses. Sometimes something like “additional comments” will on the back end look like:
There’s an established way of correcting for this in market research (and other fields): coding. Let’s say you have the following list:
utilitarian
deontologist
virtue ethics
other (please specify)
Then you have someone go through all the typed-in responses, and when someone types in “special snowflake utilitarian” you code that as a 1 rather than a 4.
This is also done for completely open-end responses. Sometimes something like “additional comments” will on the back end look like:
positive
negative
neutral