Open-ended survey questions give people the freedom to say what they really think. But for a small team of researchers and analysts at the University of New Hampshire, they also create a lot of answers to code.
Here’s what happened when Sean McKinley, project director at UNH Survey Center, brought BTInsights into his team’s survey coding workflow.
The Challenge: Coding Complex, Open-Ended Responses With a Small Team of Researchers
Before using BTInsights, Sean’s team coded survey responses manually. They exported data from SPSS into Excel, read each answer, assigned codes, and used an Excel formula to bring the coded data back into SPSS.
Short, direct answers were relatively easy to handle. But longer responses about more specialized industry topics were a completely different story. Sean and his colleagues often had to look up unfamiliar terms before they could decide which code is the best fit, and a single answer could take several minutes to work through.
With a small team, it was difficult to fit this extra work around client projects. They tried to code responses while surveys were still in the field, but they couldn’t always keep up. And if a survey closed before the coding was complete, they faced a backlog of coding before analysis could even begin.
Getting Ahead on Analysis Meant Leaving Open-Ends Behind
Sean’s team often begins analyzing survey data while responses are still coming in. This gives them a head start, but manually coding the open-ended answers took time they couldn’t always spare alongside other client work.
When they hadn’t had time to code those answers, they had to leave the open-ended questions out of the interim analysis. They could work with the rest of the survey data, but respondents’ written feedback would have to wait, limiting how much context the team could bring to its early findings.
Taking On Larger Surveys With a Small Team
The time needed to code open-ended survey responses also made larger client projects challenging. More questions and more respondents meant more answers to work through, without a larger team to share the workload.
It was clear that coding was a major bottleneck, limiting the number of projects the team could confidently take on and how quickly they could deliver results.
Coding Survey Responses With BTInsights
BTInsights’ Survey Open-Ends Coding Platform gave Sean’s team a way to take the manual coding off their plate without changing the rest of their process.
The team still starts with the same SPSS and Excel setup. They export the open-ended answers into Excel, upload them to BTInsights, and apply the client’s existing list of codes. BTInsights does the initial coding, which the team reviews before bringing the results back into Excel and SPSS.
That made it easier to adopt the platform without changing a process that already worked for them.
As Sean puts it: “The export that we can get from your platform basically plugs in seamlessly with our existing Excel setup. It’s as if we had someone who was doing all of the work that we used to do ourselves.”
The Excel file is useful to clients, too. They can filter it to see the comments behind a particular code and check how individual answers were classified, even if they don’t use SPSS.
Getting a Head Start on Analysis
As responses come in, Sean can upload an initial batch to BTInsights. Once those responses are coded and reviewed, he can bring them into SPSS and begin analyzing those questions while more answers are still coming in.
The team had tried to work this way before, but manual coding didn’t always fit around their other projects. With BTInsights handling the initial pass, they can make progress on the analysis as new responses continue to arrive. And once the full dataset is in, they can easily refresh and update to the full coding results.
The Result: Faster Coding, Better Insights for Clients
BTInsights has made coding considerably faster for Sean’s team, especially when they’re working through large batches of detailed, industry-specific responses.
Speed isn’t the only gain, though. When someone raises several points in one answer, the team can now assign a code to each relevant point. More of what respondents say makes it into the coded results, and clients get a fuller picture of the issues respondents raised.
That changes the conversations Sean can have with clients. A request for more open-ended questions no longer brings the same concern about hours of extra coding. And if a client wants to survey all its members instead of a smaller sample, Sean is less worried about handling the additional responses.
Although Sean describes himself as skeptical of AI in general, he sees open-ends coding as a very useful application. In his experience, BTInsights does roughly a similar job to the team on difficult, specialized responses, while giving them results to review considerably faster.
I’m quite a skeptic of AI, but I think it is fit for exactly what we’re asking it to do. It does a similar job in terms of quality that we do, but it saves us a ton of time and means we can deliver higher-quality work. It’s a basic thing, but it really does matter for smaller shops.
Give Every Open-Ended Survey Answer the Attention It Deserves With BTInsights
The more freedom respondents have to explain their views, the more there is for your team to uncover. Faster coding makes room for deeper analysis and helps you get those findings to clients sooner.
Want to give your team more time to do what they do best? Book a demo today to see BTInsights in action!
