SurveyMonkey

Thematic Analysis

Thematic Analysis is available for English surveys on some paid plans.

Thematic Analysis summarizes and groups your survey’s text responses into key themes, allowing you to:

  • Save time by organizing data into meaningful categories 
  • Understand the most common themes across your open-ended responses
  • View a summary of your open-ended responses to understand your results faster

Thematic Analysis is available for surveys that meet the following requirements:

  • Thematic Analysis works with text responses from Comment Box and Single Text Box questions.
  • The survey language is in English.
  • Your survey has between 1 and 10,000 responses. Filtering your dataset to display between 1–10,000 responses doesn’t change the survey's total response limit.
  • Certain survey use cases are not permitted—for details, please see SurveyMonkey's Acceptable Uses Policy, as well as additional third-party provider usage policies.
  • Thematic Analysis isn’t available to HIPAA-enabled accounts or those with an Enhanced Sensitive Data Protection account.
  • Thematic Analysis is only available to accounts in the US Data Center.

Thematic Analysis uses a combination of a self-hosted Anthropic model and an Azure OpenAI or OpenAI model to summarize and analyze your survey. Your data is not used to train any of these providers' AI models. Learn more about how this feature processes your data.

You’ll only see the Thematic Analysis feature if it’s available on your plan. If you’re on a Team or Enterprise account, your Admin controls whether you have access to this feature.

To turn on Thematic Analysis:

  1. Go to the Analyze Results section.
  2. Find a Comment Box or Single Text Box question.
  3. Select the Thematic Analysis tab. 
  4. Click Generate themes.

Once the analysis is complete, your question summary provides a high-level overview. You can also review the themes that were applied to your responses. 

If a response doesn't have enough detail to categorize, we label it as No applied theme*.

You can also enable Sentiments to better understand your respondents’ feelings while responding to your survey.

If you collect additional responses, generate themes again to apply them to your new responses and update the summary.

You’ll see this option when you collect new responses to a question. To regenerate, select Regenerate in the Thematic Analysis tab.

Once we generate themes, you can view your open-ended responses and filter them by theme in the Thematic Analysis page.

To view and filter responses by theme:

  1. In the Analyze Results section, find a question with a Comment Box or Single Text Box question with themes generated.
  2. Select the Thematic Analysis tab.
  3. Select View details.
  4. Check the boxes for the themes you want to display.

To export responses with themes for your question:

  1. In the Analyze Results section of your survey, find a question with text responses that you applied themes to.
  2. Select the Thematic Analysis tab.
  3. Select View details.
  4. Select Export. We’ll save the export to your device as a .zip file.  

The export includes the following data:

  • Respondent ID
  • Response date
  • Response text
  • Tags applied
  • Themes applied
  • Response sentiment (if you’ve enabled Sentiment Analysis)