SurveyMonkey

Thematic Analysis

Beta: Thematic Analysis is a new feature, and we're working hard to improve it. Share your feedback to help us make this feature better!

Thematic Analysis automatically groups text responses by key themes, allowing you to:

  • Reduce time spent organizing data into meaningful categories
  • Understand the most common themes across your open-ended responses

Thematic Analysis works with text responses from Comment Box and Single Text Box questions.

  • 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 works for responses created in English only.
  • Thematic Analysis is available to accounts in the US Data Center.

When you turn on Thematic Analysis for a survey, the feature uses AI to analyze your responses and identify common themes. Your data remains private and secure during and after use of this feature. Learn more about how this feature processes your data.

You’ll only see the Thematic Analysis option if it’s available on your plan. For Teams and Enterprise accounts, your admin controls whether you have access to this feature.

To turn on Thematic Analysis:

  1. Go to the Analyze Results section of your survey.
  2. Find a question with open text responses.
  3. Select the Thematic Analysis tab. 
  4. Select Generate themes
  5. If this is your first time using Thematic Analysis on the question, you’ll see a confirmation message. Select Continue

We’ll start generating themes based on your open-ended responses. Review the themes we applied to your responses. You can also enable Sentiments to better understand your respondents’ feelings while responding to your survey.

If you collect more responses, generate themes again to apply them to your new responses.

To regenerate themes, select Regenerate themes in the Thematic Analysis tab. You’ll see this option after collecting new open-ended responses.

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

To view themed responses and filter by theme:

  1. In the Analyze Results section of your survey, find a question with text responses that you applied themes to.
  2. Go to the Thematic Analysis tab, then select View details.
  3. Check the boxes for the themes you want to display.

To export responses for your question:

  1. In the Analyze Results section of your survey, find a question with text responses that you applied themes to.
  2. Go to the Thematic Analysis tab, then select View details
  3. 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)