Bucketing Fields

About Bucketing Fields

You can “bucket” answers to questions into new groups. As soon as a bucketed field is created, it’s applied to existing data, and applied to all new responses going forward. Creating a bucketed field can be a great way to split out your data in different ways for reports and filters without having to make edits to an active survey.

This support page covers how to create a bucketed field. If you’d like to edit an existing bucket field, see Editing Custom Fields.

Example: Let’s say you distribute a survey internationally, asking what country each respondent lives in. Halfway through data collection, you realize you don’t just want to do analyses on the countries, but the whole continents. It’s too late to add a new question or an embedded data element that captures this information, so you bucket countries into regions.

Creating a Bucketing Field

Go to the Data & Analysis tab.

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Select Field Editor.

Click Create Field.

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Select Bucketing at the top.

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Name your field.

Click Select Field to choose the data to bucket. You can choose from all available survey questions, survey metadata, contact fields, or embedded data.

Qtip: You can bucket any multiple choice or numeric data. You cannot bucket other custom fields or open text data (like a standard text entry).

Qtip: The selected field must have 200 or fewer unique values. (I.e., questions cannot have 200+ answer choices.) If the field exceeds this amount, you’ll see the message “Too Many Source Values” in the Source Values box.

Name the groups your values will be sorted into.

You can add more groups by clicking Add Group.

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Drag fields from the Source Values box to the groups on the right.

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Qtip: Note that you don’t need to have every field sorted into a group. Whenever a value isn’t sorted into a group, it’s marked Uncategorized within your new bucketed field.

Click Create Field.

Select Review and Publish to save your changes.

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Click Publish your Changes.

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Qtip: Click Data Table to return to your response data.

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Attention: Bucketing is compatible with multiple answer questions. However, only 1 group can be assigned per response. For example, if you allow respondents to choose multiple countries where they’ve lived, a field that bucketed countries into continents would only assign them the continent of their first selected answer.

Bucketing Numeric Ranges

When the field you’re trying to bucket is numeric in format, you divide your buckets into numeric ranges instead of the categorical groups described in the previous section.

Example: You want to create buckets for a range of answers to your slider or numeric text entry.

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Qtip: Even if an embedded data field is saved in a numeric format, it will always behave like a categorical bucket instead. Multiple choice questions will also always behave as categorical buckets, even if they’re recoded.

Projects Where You Can Bucket Fields

Depending on your license, you may have access to several different types of projects that have a Data & Analysis tab. The options described on this page are available in:

• Survey projects
• XM Solutions
• Imported data projects
• 360 projects

  

  Qtip: See Creating New Fields (360) for more details.

• Conjoint / MaxDiff

  

  Qtip: While you can bucket Conjoint and MaxDiff-specific fields, the data may not make sense and cannot be recoded. We recommend only bucketing survey fields.

• CX Dashboards

Qtip: When custom fields are added to a CX Dashboard, they become derived data. Although supported, they behave a little differently than other survey fields do. See Derived Data for more details.

While the functionality is technically available, we do not recommend using these custom fields with other types of Employee Experience projects. See Creating New Fields (EX) for more details.

Qtip: While other areas of the platform (like dashboards, Stats iQ, and directories) may also allow you to create new fields, this support page is solely focused on how to create new custom fields in Data & Analysis. For steps on creating other kinds of fields across the XM platform, try narrowing your support site search.