The Difficulty of Analyzing Comment Questions — And a Solution

As I preach in my workshops on how to create better learner-survey questions (for example my Gold-Certification workshop on Performance-Focused Smile Sheets), open-ended comment questions are very powerful questions. Indeed, they are critical in our attempts to truly understand our learners’ perspectives.

Unfortunately, to get the most benefit from comment questions, we have to take time to read every response and reflect on the meaning of all the comments taken together. Someday AI may be able to help us parse comment-question data, but currently the technology is not ready to give us a full understanding. Nor are word clouds or other basic text-processing algorithms useful enough to provide valid insights into our data.

It’s good to take the time in analyzing our comment-question data, but if there was a way to quickly get a sense of comment data, wouldn’t we consider using it? Of course!

As most of you know, I’ve been focusing a lot of my attention on learning evaluation over the last few years. While I’ve learned a lot, have been lauded by others as an evaluation thought leader, and have even created some useful innovations like LTEM, I’m still learning. Today, by filling out a survey after going to a CVS MinuteClinic to get a vaccine shot, I learned something pretty cool. Take a look.

This is a question on their survey, delivered to me right after I’d answered a comment question. This gives the survey analyzers a way to quickly categorize the comments. It DOES NOT REPLACE, or should not replace, a deeper look at the comments (for example, my comment was very specific and useful i hope), but it does enable us to ascribe some overall meaning to the results.

Note that this is similar to what I’ve been calling a hybrid question, where we first give people a forced-choice question and then give them a comment question. The forced choice question drives clarity whereas the follow-up comment question enables more specificity and richness.

One warning! Adding a forced choice question after a comment question should be seen as a tool in our toolbox. Let’s not overuse it. More pointedly, let’s use it when it is particularly appropriate.

If we’ve asked two open-ended comment questions—one asking for positive feedback and one asking for constructive criticism—we might not need a follow-up forced choice question, because we’ve already prompted respondents to give us the good and the bad.

The bottom line is that we now have two types of hybrid questions to add to our toolbox:

  1. Forced-choice question followed by clarifying comment question.
  2. Comment question followed by categorizing forced-choice question.

Freakin’ Awesome!