Always ensure you provide guidelines to handle open-ended responses.

This is very helpful when you code open-ended responses.
Guidelines are necessary to ensure that consistent standards are applied in assigning codes.

Typically, the coding process involves devising categories to classify and group responses and then assigning a category to individual responses.

Notes/Instructions about each code are important to the administrator and other staff or stakeholders involved in the coding process especially when decisions about assigning codes are tricky. Situations commonly arise that require direction, such as:

• response is incomplete or makes little sense
• response is ambiguous
• response is valid but does not link with the other answers
• response is valid but addresses more than one issue
• response is valid but can grouped with more than one code

The E-valuate-IT coding tool enables you to create category names by which to classify and group open-ended responses and assists you to assign a category of best fit to the responses:

Code Options: are names to group open-ended responses. These options can be further edited at any time.

Notes/ Instructions: are attached to the Code Option to provide guidance and consistency with how to interpret answers. You may hide or display Notes/ Instructions whenever you assign codes to open-ended responses. These comments can be further edited at any time.