Word cloudsĪ word cloud is a visualization that shows all the words in text, packaged closely together, with the font size indicating the frequency with which words appear, with less interesting words (e.g., “the”) automatically excluded. However, coding is very expensive, so text analytics is the usual method for larger quantities of text. For example, it is hard to train a computer to correctly analyze “I love Coke. For example, sentiment analysis automatically calculates the sentiment of phrases based on the number of positive and negative words that appear.Īll else being equal, text analytics is less informative than coding, as humans are better at correctly interpreting meaning in text than algorithms. Text analytics involves using algorithms to automatically convert text to numbers to perform a quantitative analysis.

Variables created in the previous step are then analyzed (e.g., using frequency tables or crosstabs).

In the case of the question “What don’t you like about Tom Cruise?” it would be appropriate to permit multiple responses. Depending on the data, each response will be assigned either one value ( single response), or multiple values ( multiple response). If the person said, “I really love Tom!”, the code assigned would be 1. The assigned value reflects the code created in the previous stage.

Then someone reads all the data text and manually assigns a value or values to each response.The list of categories and their associated codes is known as a code frame. For example, for the question asked about attitudes to Tom Cruise, the categories may be: 1. One or two people read through some of the data (e.g., 200 randomly selected responses), and use their judgment to identify some main categories.The traditional approach to analyzing text data is to code the data. How do you analyze free-form text data? 1. There are three main ways of analyzing such data: coding, text analytics, and word clouds.

The data generated from these questions is known variously as text data, free-form text data, verbatims, and open-ended data. For example, a question may ask “What is the first brand that comes to mind when you think of insurance?” or “What don’t you like about Tom Cruise?”. What is Free-Form Text Data from Surveys?Ĭustomer feedback surveys often allow respondents to answer questions in their own words. But how do you analyze the free-form text data from your survey? I'll show you three different methods and explain when you might want to use each.

You want to give your survey respondents the opportunity to answer open-ended questions or elaborate on their responses.

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