SurveyMonkey

Thematic Analysis

BETA: Thematic Analysis is only available to some customers with accounts hosted in the US Data Center at this time. This feature is available for English surveys only.

Thematic Analysis automatically groups text responses by key themes. Thematic Analysis allows 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, and acceptable use and conduct 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.

SurveyMonkey's Thematic Analysis feature uses a self-hosted Anthropic model in its secure data environment to analyze and group your responses. Your survey data remains private and secure. Anthropic does not have access to your data and your data is not used to train their AI models. We also mask common data types, like phone numbers, to reduce exposure of potentially sensitive data.

When you turn on Thematic Analysis for a survey, your question text, response text, and response ID are analyzed to look for common themes. Those themes are then applied to relevant responses.

You’ll only see the Thematic Analysis option if it’s available on your plan.

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)