Open-ended questions in organizational surveys: some considerations from a Safety Climate research.

Qualitative research has received a growing attention during the last few years. In particular, mixed methodologies have arisen and a growing number of publications features them. Thus, investigating whether using both closed and open-ended questions in organizational surveys is worth it, is an emerging issue. Our contribution will add some new information on a socially constructed phenomenon in the workplace: safety climate, which will be helpful to both academics and practitioners. This study aims to investigate whether open-ended questions could add a valuable information in addition to closed questions in a safety climate survey conducted in Italy (N=1852), using a multilevel assessment instrument for Safety Climate, which separately considers supervisor and co-workers as climate’s agents. Results confirmed that negative comments are more frequent than neutral or positive ones. Negative comments were also longer than positive ones in the subscale concerning co-workers and not in the supervisor’s subscale. Third, a positive correlation between tone and safety climate level was found. Finally, workers who made comments perceived a lower level of safety climate compared with workers who did not make any comment. These results are discussed considering that open-ended and close-ended questions are based on different cognitive processes. Therefore, going deeper into the evaluation and judgement biases (i.e. cognitive biases) which have a role when people are giving a free comment is necessary.