Dear colleague,

I afraid, there is no such practice in large scale Survey Research. You could find semi-structured questions, such as for employment status, occupation (Census questionnaire http://www.nsi.bg/census2011/PDOCS2/karta_Census2011_en_1.pdf question 26 for example), or age. Open-ended questions I find mostly in some national Surveys, where there is no sufficient data for standardisation about some social phenomena. You could check the generic questionnaire of WVS, ESS, SHARE, GGS.