Viewing Open-Ended Responses

Open-ended questions, such as Comments Box and Single Textbox, capture answers in the respondent’s own words. Because these can’t be charted like multiple-choice questions, SurveyMethods presents them in their own dedicated card.

Finding Open-Ended Answers

Open your survey and go to the Analyze tab
Scroll to the open-ended question you want to review
The question card shows its free-text answers directly, rather than a chart

For a general overview of the Analyze view, see Analyzing Survey Results.

The Response Tabs

Each open-ended question card offers up to three tabs:

Tab	What it shows
Responses	Every free-text answer, listed one per row
Word Cloud	The most frequently used words, sized by how often they appear
Sentiment Analysis	A breakdown of positive, neutral, and negative responses

Name, Email, and Phone questions show only the Responses tab, since a word cloud and sentiment aren’t meaningful for that kind of data.

Searching Responses

On the Responses tab, use the Search Responses… box to filter the list to answers containing a keyword or phrase. This makes it easy to find every comment that mentions a specific product, feature, or topic.

Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Analysis automatically categorizes each text answer as positive, neutral, or negative so you can gauge the emotion behind the feedback. Turn it on with the switch on the Sentiment Analysis tab, then click any segment of the bar to filter the responses down to that sentiment.

This feature is available on paid Professional, Team Professional, and Enterprise plans. For automatic summaries of your findings, see AI-Powered Results Presentation.

Reading Answers in Context

To see a respondent’s open-ended answers alongside the rest of their submission, use Individual Results.

Exporting Open-Ended Text

Open-ended answers are included when you download your data. See Exporting Survey Data for the available formats.

Need help? Browse more articles in the Analysis section.