Open ended questions can surface both unusual responses and assess the salience of ideas in a respondent population. This paper discusses results of surveys in an open ended format called the essay survey. The surveys consisted of a single, very general, open ended question beginning with "Please write your thoughts about cigarette smoking" and continuing with some very general guidelines with minimal suggestions about what the thoughts should be. The survey was administered to both university undergraduates and a national Internet sample from Survey Sampling International. Salience was inferred from the frequency of scored ideas in the respondent text and was found to differ by no more than 3 percent between the two populations for 85 percent of the 26 scored ideas from about 1000 sentences from each of the two populations. The method had high sensitivity for both rare and common ideas that were present in 0.02 to 19 percent of the respondent sentences.

The responses were scored by computer using the InfoTrend software (U.S. Patent 5,371,673 and patents pending). This software allows the user to specify key words and phrases as well as how words in sentences or paragraphs can be combined to give complex meaning. For example, the user can specify that "not" to the left of "support" to the left of a political candidate name can lead to an unfavorable score for that candidate. The user writes scoring algorithms in ASCII text so that any subsequent user will have an unambiguous understanding of the meaning of the scores. Repeated benchmarking shows that the accuracy of the machine scoring is the same as that among human coders for complex ideas. The software is accessed via the Internet through a password protected site.