How to Use Open Text Boxes in Surveys

I personally like surveys where people can just, how do you identify and a person fills in the blank? That's one of my favorite type of surveys. But again, I feel this is a ways that people are not trained. Another way to do this is to have an extensive array of options. So all of the different possible identities and then say, check all that apply. And you might still collapse some of those in your analysis, but then you have that data as well.