Method and Strategy of Analysis of Open Quesitons of the French Electoral Panel: This article presents a voting survey method which includes many open questions, the detailed strategies of analysis employed and also, based on analyzed examples, the methodololgical advances - and their limits - of such strageties which mix quantitative and qualitative approaches. During the spring 2002 elections, a survey apparatus was set up including a panel which would permit the measuring of French political opinions and behavior over three waves of the survey. The first part of this article addresses problems engendered by this survey apparatus and how they have been handled. This involves the creation of a typology of open questions, the place of open questions in a questionnaire, interviewer/interviewee interactions, etc. Replies to part of the questions were transcribed and analyzed using the Alceste program. The choice of these questions and the use of a text analysis approach are discussed in the second part of the article. To retum to a more explanatory approach, it is possible to cross-tabulate the classes produced by Alceste and the closed quesitons of the questionnaire. This procedure encounters several difficult problems that are both technical and epistomological that we address in the third part of the article.
