A common problem with surveys is how to analyse the open-ends (or to non-researchers the verbatim/text comments) received in the survey. It’s all very well seeing 27% dissatisfied here and scores of 82+ there, but some explanation in the respondents’ own words can truly open up our understanding of the results in front of us. And the problem is that if your survey has even a modest hundred or so responses, just reading through these comments eats up time… You have more than a thousand comments? Oh, see you next week then.
Introducing Word Clouds
A quick and simple way that can help you get a feel for the content of your verbatims is to create a word cloud. This is a visual interpretation of a count of each word in the selected text – removing all the common little words such as “the”, “in”, “he”, “and” etc. The higher the count, the bigger the word appears in the cloud.
One way to create a word cloud is to use the excellent little service at Wordle.net. It’s also free!
- Highlight all of the verbatim comments in your survey results and then select ‘Edit’ then ‘Copy’ from the menu (or click [ctrl] + [c] on the keyboard).
- Go to www.wordle.net and click Create your own.
- In the big text box under the instruction , right click the mouse and select ‘Paste’.
- Click the ‘Go’ button.
That’s it – you’ll end up with something that looks like this below (but containing your words):
From here, you can edit the font, colours, horizontal versus vertical, etc, but hopefully your ‘wordle’ can help you quickly identify common topics or issues being raised in your survey. Armed with this information you might then use this to specifically search the comments for all responses containing the words X or Y…
A word cloud doesn’t replace genuine analysis of the comments received but for a couple of minutes effort it can save significant effort reading/scanning volumes of text just to get the gist of what’s being said.
Finally, if you want to save this output for use in your own report you need to take a screenshot. The FAQ on Wordle gives you some options. Also, before you use the service, check that you are comfortable with its security (Is Wordle safe to use on confidential or private text?) – nothing is saved/stored unless you use the save function but note that makes your wordle publically visible to the whole wide world.
Have fun!
Dan Wardle
Offering expert advice for designing and implementing online survey best practice. We share our experiences working in the fields of customer satisfaction and employee engagement research.
We have just rolled out our own word cloud functionality in our online reports – read more here: Introducing Word Clouds (new client reporting feature)