Ritorno a Likert : verso una survey discorsiva

Survey - For decades, the dilemma between open-ended and closed-ended response alternatives occupied the methodological debate. Over the years, dominant approaches in survey have reacted to this dilemma by opting for fixed response alternatives and the standardization of interviewer’s behaviour. If this methodological decision has been the survey’s fortune, making it the methodology most widely used in the social sciences, however it produces a large amount of biases well known in the literature. In order to re- medy these biases an alternative proposal can be designed by re-discovering and adapting two «old» proposals: Likert’s technique called «fixed question/free answers», and Galtung’s procedure named «open question/closed answer». Both procedures are guided by the same principle: make the interview into a conversation, let the interviewee answer freely in his/her own words, and thus release him/her from the researcher’s schemes.