In a short essay, define unstructured questions and discuss at least two advantages and two disadvantages to using these types of questions

What will be an ideal response?

Unstructured questions are open-ended questions that respondents answer in their own words. They are also referred to as free-response or free-answer questions. The advantages of open-ended questions include enabling the respondents to express general attitudes and opinions that can help the researcher interpret their responses to structured questions. Open-ended questions allow the respondent to express their attitudes or opinions without the bias associated with restricting responses to predefined alternatives. Thus they can be useful in identifying underlying motivations, beliefs, and attitudes. Unstructured questions are useful in exploratory research. The disadvantages of unstructured questions relate to recording error, data coding, and the added complexity of analysis. In personal or telephone interviews, successfully recording verbatim comments depends entirely on the recording skills of the interviewer. Categorizing the recording comments to open-ended questions introduces the second source of bias and another major disadvantage. Unstructured questions are also of limited value in self-administered questionnaires because respondents tend to be briefer in writing than in speaking.