Great call with Nicola, my supervisor, yesterday. The talk essentially resulted in me being schooled on the ins and outs of qualitative data analysis when using survey methods. There is a great web app called 'NVIVO' highlighted by Nicola, that is (of course) capable of parsing all anonymous survey data and turning it into bite-sized, graphical, and actionable insight. Now, after watching a lovely instructional video about how to use the app, it has dawned on me that coding such responses from the proposed survey to map (categorise) the array of information I receive would be a lot better than an approach focused on manual analysis.
I wrote on the ol' Google blog earlier that I aim to minimise the use of regressions in the final write-up. That doesn't mean I will completely ignore the methodology, though. Nicola, on our 30-min call, suggested I consider the value of closed questions for the proposed survey. I am fairly certain that this is because closed questions allow for more definitive conclusions and are therefore ten times easier to 'churn', which was the word I used in my question to Nicola to describe the task of handling survey data practically.