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Download the white paper
Gaining Full Value from Survey Text.
There are two fundamental reasons for including text responses. First, the words respondents choose often give you new insight into their thinking. Second, if you rely exclusively on closed-ended questions, you are framing not only the question but also the possible answers - in effect, constructing and interpreting reality for respondents. How can you be sure you've gotten it right? What if you have omitted a significant alternative response? Or what if the way a question has been asked has skewed or biased responses?
To acknowledge these issues, it's wise to include open-ended questions in your surveys. Previously, you may not have done more with these responses than select one or two to illustrate trends shown in the more easily quantified numeric data. Now, thanks to new tools for text analysis, you can more easily derive full value from text responses.
The most effective of these new tools use the technologies of
linguistics-based text analytics.
The most important difference is that linguistics-based text analytics is built upon a class of algorithms that analyze the structure and meaning of the language of a text - thus enabling computer systems to analyze the ambiguities inherent in verbal communication. Such linguistics-based text analytics technologies are the foundation for all IBM SPSS text analytics.
Read more in the white paper Gaining Full Value from Survey Text.