I'd say it depends on your question. You could, for instance try to inductively develop categories (e.g. issues, problems etc) from the perspective of the respondents. In this case you might want to have a look at David Thomas 2006 paper "A General Inductive Approach for Analyzing Qualitative Evaluation Data".
However, you might have developed categories already and could be interested in how specific problems/issues are "framed". In this case you would use open answers to identify these frames. In this case you could read Erving Goffman´s "frame analysis" or a related paper (e.g.Frederic Jameson´s review article or Scheff´s 2005 article The Structure of Context: Deciphering Frame Analysis.
Alexander Ruser I also like Thomas' "Generic Analysis," but it came out the same year as Braun and Clarke (2006) and is very similar to what they recommendation. I cannot say why their version of Thematic Analysis became the more popular of the two, but with nearly 100,000 citations in Google Scholar, it is now the most widely used approach to qualitative analysis.
If I understood the question very well, of course, a qualitative research methods is an appropriate one. If someone is looking for the software, I like ATLAST.ti (ATLAS.ti 7 2012) as it helps for coding and thematic analysis. It populates similar notions/concepts, simplify navigation through data/documents, and ease analysis. Neuman (2007) and Braun and Clarke (2006) are also useful methods to conduct deductive reasoning and validate the arguments.
There are many ways we can use data analysis for open-ended question interview; I found two following methods are useful:
Thematic analysis (understanding people’s views, opinions, knowledge, experiences or values – for example, interview transcripts, social media profiles, or survey responses. I used this method:
Article Participatory action research and researcher’s responsibilit...
Narrative analysis (understanding how and why people talk about their lives as a story or stories). Steps: https://www.proquest.com/docview/1976405583?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true