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Thematic Analysis

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 the Comment box and Single textbox questions.
  • The survey 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 isn't available if your data is stored in Canada or EU data centers.

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.

To turn on Thematic Analysis for your entire survey:

  1. Go to the Analyze results section of your survey.
  2. Select Options from the top toolbar.
  3. From the menu, select Data Options
  4. Toggle Thematic analysis.

You can also enable Thematic analysis from the Theme management tab of any Comment box or Single-textbox question that has responses.

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 use 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 Refresh in the question tile.

Once we generate themes, you can view your open-ended responses and filter them by theme.

To export responses with themes included:

  1. Go to the Analyze results.
  2. Select Export from the top toolbar, and select New export.
  3. Select Question summaries.
  4. Choose XLS or CSV, and select Open-ended responses.
  5. Select Export. When your download is ready, a notification to Download briefly displays to export the file to your computer. You can also find your files for 14 days by selecting Export and choosing Previous exports.

To export an individual question with themes included:

  1. Go to the Analyze results.
  2. Find a question that uses Thematic analysis.
  3. Select Export at the top of the tile.
  4. Select XLS, or select More options to select CSV file format.
  5. Select Export. When your download is ready, a notification to Download briefly displays to export the file to your computer. You can also find your files for 14 days by selecting Export and choosing Previous exports.

The export includes the following data:

  • Respondent ID
  • Response date
  • Response text
  • Tags applied
  • Themes applied
  • Response sentiment (if Sentiment analysis is on)