Seriously, dude, coding. Surely someone would be willing to volunteer to code a couple hundred open-ends. It should take like 5 minutes if you’re willing to use broad brushstrokes. And if most of the raw data is made public, the later sifting for interesting tidbits is crowdsourced.
Well, sure, you could do that. But if I decided to hand-code all of the political write-ins into standard political terms like “liberal”, “conservative”, “etc”, then all I’d end up with is a list of people’s political preferences in a few bins of standard political terms.
Which is exactly what I have now when I don’t allow write-ins. This way is easier for me and allows people to choose their bin themselves rather than have me try to guess whether some complicated philosophy is more conservative than libertarian or vice versa.
Seriously, dude, coding. Surely someone would be willing to volunteer to code a couple hundred open-ends. It should take like 5 minutes if you’re willing to use broad brushstrokes. And if most of the raw data is made public, the later sifting for interesting tidbits is crowdsourced.
Well, sure, you could do that. But if I decided to hand-code all of the political write-ins into standard political terms like “liberal”, “conservative”, “etc”, then all I’d end up with is a list of people’s political preferences in a few bins of standard political terms.
Which is exactly what I have now when I don’t allow write-ins. This way is easier for me and allows people to choose their bin themselves rather than have me try to guess whether some complicated philosophy is more conservative than libertarian or vice versa.
But does not allow for the creation of new bins, if we spot different clusters.
What dlthomas said. If 20% of your respondents wrote in “anarchist”, then you have a new punch.