When designing a survey, one of the best ways to listen to your survey participants’ real voices is to utilize open-text questions. By doing so, you can let them share their thoughts freely without limiting their options.

After gathering qualitative data through open-text questions, analysts usually go through the cleaning or profiling process to remove typos, categorize them into common themes, etc.

Qualtrics, one of the popular survey tools in the United States, offers a nice way to do so using “Text iQ”. With Text iQ, analysts can assign topics to open-ended questions and then use the “New Word Cloud” widget to visualize the qualitative data.

If you are new to Qualtrics, you might be wondering how you can assign more than one-word topics as the “New Word Cloud” widget breaks down every word for visualization. Similarly, you might wonder how to assign more than one topic to each response.

This blog post will show you different ways to work around creating more than one-word topics using Text iQ and assigning more than one word to successfully visualize them in the Qualtrics dashboard. Let’s jump right in!

Contents

1. How to assign more than one-word topic in Qualtrics Text IQ
2. How to assign multiple topics to one response and make them appear in the dashboard
3. How to visualize topics in Qualtrics Dashboard

1. How to assign more than one-word topic in Qualtrics Text IQ

First, to assign topics to open-ended questions, go to the “Data & Analysis” tab then click the “Text iQ”

It will ask you what survey questions you would like to add. Here’s a pro tip: When you add questions to the data set, select all questions that you’d like to add topics as updating the data set later takes quite a time.

Once all survey questions are loaded, click each question to start assigning topics by clicking the “+” button. Note that only one word will appear in the dashboard. Therefore, it is essential to find a word that can summarize the open-text responses.

If more than one word must be used as a topic, use the upper case and make it one word like “CareerRelated” instead of “Career Related.” It is worth noting that the word cloud widget will convert all the upper cases to lower cases. Still, making the first word capitalized is easier to read in the data view and useful for further analysis.

*Pro tip: I found that there’s a bug where if the topics are similar (e.g. RA and TA), it does not show one topic in the dashboard. It was driving me crazy as the topic “TA” was assigned the most, but the word was not showing up in the dashboard! Once I spelled out and refreshed the data set, the word (teaching assistant) finally showed. Therefore, it is encouraged to write out the abbreviations in full if you have more than one acronym that looks similar to the others.

You can add topics to all pages and click the “Review and publish” button. The more survey responses you have, the more time it will take to update the data set.

Once you are done adding topics, it’s time to visualize them! Let’s go to the “Data” tab and take a look at how to visualize topics, not raw responses, in the Qualtrics Dashboard.

1. Go to the “Data & Analysis” tab and click the “Data” tab

2. Click the “Field Editor” button on the right-hand side
3. Click the “Create Field” button

4. Give the name to the new field (e.g. Q4 Organized Topics) and select “Text” for the Field Type

5. Select the topics from the Source drop-down menu to select topics.

*Pro tip: If you are not sure what to choose, create a new field go to “Bucketing” and click each option to see what includes all the topics (see the image below)

6. Destination will be automatically selected for the new field that you created as well as the “Type.” Note that the “Open Text” type will allow topics to appear in the dashboard.

7. Click the “Review and Publish” button on the bottom, right corner

8. Click the “Publish your Changes” button

Before you go to the Qualtrics Dashboard to visualize topics, you may want to confirm if the new field has been created correctly. To do so, return to the Data Table then click the “Column Chooser.”

From there, click “Embedded Data” and click the field that you just created as well as the original survey question. By doing so, you can compare row-by-row to see if the correct topic has been assigned.

2. How to assign multiple topics to one response and make them appear in the dashboard

Let’s take a look at how to assign multiple topics when needed. Beginners might question, can’t you just assign multiple topics?

I found that when you create new fields as we saw above, the field will only choose one topic for each response. Therefore, even though multiple topics are assigned to each topic, only one topic will be visualized in the Qualtrics dashboard.

To work around this, we can use the hyphen “-,” instead of assigning multiple topics.

1. Put multiple keywords (topics) using the hyphen “-” in one topic

It’s not ideal as you need to remember the exact topic. To type the same topic across the pages, refer to the left navigation pane where you can see the list of topics that you created.

Then, follow through the step 3 below to visualize them. As you can see, before assigning multiple topics, the word “Career” was the biggest. However, once you cleaned the qualitative data, it turns out that the word “OISS” appeared the most and the word “Career” was broken down into two – Career Coach and Career Center.

3. How to visualize topics in Qualtrics Dashboard

1. Go to the “Results” tab

2. Click the “Add Widget” button
3. Click the “New Word Cloud” button

4. Under the Source, select the newly added field (e.g. Q4 Organized Topics)

5. Give the proper title and click the “Done” button on the bottom

Here’s the before – using the word cloud for raw responses- and after- using the word cloud after assigning topics. As you can see, before assigning topics, it was not intuitive to see what respondents wanted to say. After topics are assigned, problems become more clear.

Hope my work around ways of assigning topics is helpful! If there’s a better way, feel free to leave comments. To see all the posts for college administrators, click here.