Part 5: Surveys
Text answers
Your text answers are displayed differently from your single and multiple choice questions. First, there’s a word cloud showing you the most common words.
Below is a table with all the answers for the selected time periods.
The default is to show 10 answers per page, but with more than 50 answers, you can select how many to show per page, with up to 100 answers per page.
The text answers in the table have been analyzed by our automatic system to detect potential personal information, which is then masked. However, occasionally, personal information splits through, but you are able to flag personal information manually too. Read more here.
Categorizing text answers
The text answers are displayed in a table, but as soon as you have more than 20 answers, analyzing from a table become complicated. Therefore, you also have the option to categorize your answers. Click on the pen and paper icon to open the categorization tool.
Here you’ll be able to see the same information as before, but the table will also contain the columns “Tag” and “Sentiment”.
The tags are your categories, which you choose and create yourself. The sentiments, on the other hand, are always the same: Positive, Neutral, and Negative.
The sentiments are an easy way to categorize the tone of the answers, so that you later can filter for only the positive comments, or only the negative, for example.
The tags are much more specific that the sentiments, and are categories for the content and the tone. For example, if you have text answers for “Other role”, you may need categories such are “Engineer”, “Technician”, and “Potential customer”. But for text answers about what the respondents couldn't find, you may need categories such as "Yearly financial report", "Sales contact information", and "Job opportunities".
Here, we’ll only focus on how this tool works, but if you want to read more about which categories to use and how to think while categorizing answers, we have an article about that here.
To add categories, or tags, to your answer, you’ll first need to add some tags. Before we look at how, here are two things to consider:
- Read some of your answers to find which tags are needed, and add more as you discover new categories. In other words, don’t predefine your categories, but base them on the answers you have received.
- If you have grouped surveys, for example language versions, you will have the same categories for all the surveys in the same group. That means that you need to decide which language you want for your categories and use the same categories for all the surveys, regardless of the language of the individual survey.
Alright, to add a tag, click on “Select tag” and write your new tag at the bottom of the list. Press Enter to add the tag. Let's call this one "Example tag".
As you can see, the tag has been added to your list of tags in the table as well. It is now ready for use.
To add a tag to and answer, you simply click on the tag.
You remove a tag the same way, by clicking on it. You can also add more than one tag per answer, but to make the results easier to analyze, we recommend that you try to limit to 1 tag in most cases.
The categories, or tags, that your have added are not final, but you can change them if needed. Select the tag you want to change.
If you have made a spelling error or found a better phrasing, you can give your tag a new name.
However, if you have used the tag before, don’t give it a name that has a different meaning from the previous name, as that will complicate the analysis. If you need a different tag, add a new one instead.
You are also able to remove tags. However, you can only remove tags that have not been used. If you want to remove a tag that has been used, you first need to remove the tag from those answers. To do that, start by selecting a date range that includes all uses of the tag. Then, open the tool for categorizing answers and select the tag.
Now you will be able to see how many answers have this tag…
…and you can also remove the tag from those answer with the use of a button.
Once the tag is not connected to any of the answers, you are able to remove it again.
Apart from the “Remove from X responses”, you also have the “Add to X responses”. This button is useful if your respondents are using searchable key words.
For example, if you have several respondents that answered something related to jobs as their purpose, you can use “job” to filter your responses…
…then select the appropriate tag, in this example “Job opportunity”…
…and then add the tag to all the answers that are using the key word.
Apart from filtering by searching for words, you can also filter by tag and sentiment…
…and you can also sort the answers based on the different columns.
After you have added tags to your text answers, you will get an new chart above the text answers, showing you the categories.
This means that you now have a chart for your text answers as well, and unless you’re very strict with “1 tag maximum per answer”, this will be a multiple choice equivalent. The chart gives you a much better overview of what the respondents said, than simply a list of text answers.
Now that you know how to display and sort you data, it time to look the different filter options. We'll start with the date range before looking at how to create segments.