Topics in Text iQ

About Creating Text Topics

Topics are a great way of tagging your text responses in Text iQ. They help you figure out common themes in feedback, and can be used in graphs and tables in reporting.

There are several ways to create topics.

• Searching Text Responses: Build out topics by searching for complex, related terms. This can be useful for tagging many responses at a time. See the Creating Topics from Searches section below.
• Manually: Click the blue plus sign ( + ) on a response and type the topic name. Once you’ve defined your topic, press the Enter key on your keyboard. This adds the topic to the selected response only.
• Recommended Topics: Qualtrics will recommend topics to you based on frequently discussed terms. See the Recommended Topics section below.
• Import Topics: Import topics used in other analyses, or use topics from the Qualtrics topic library. See the Importing Topics section below

Creating Topics from Searches

You can use the search function to create topics that update as you add new responses. That means you don’t have to manually tag every piece of feedback talking about your food as “food” – it’ll happen automatically!

1. Type in a search term and press Enter or return on your keyboard.
   
2. Click Create Topic.
3.  Name the topic.
   
4. Click Add Topic.

Now whenever a response with the matching search query is created, it will be tagged with this topic.

Building Queries

Like a lot of keyword systems, Text can recognize complex logical strings built using a few simple commands.

Single Word

For example, if you search the word dress, you would not only find responses with the word dress, but misspellings and variations (driss, dresses, etc.).

Phrase

For example, if you search the phrase formal dress, you would find responses that contain the phrase “formal dress.”

And / & / &&

Conjoins two words together. Rather than searching for just slow, it would be more useful to search for slow and Internet to ensure we get just the comments we want.

Or / | / ||

Searches for two words independently. Rather than searching for just cost, it might help to look for cost or price, as the words tend to be used interchangeably.

Not / – / !

Searches for one word without the other. Rather than searching for just food, we might want to say food not burger to see comments about our food but not our hamburgers. You could also word this search as food !burger to achieve the same results. Like many other operators, you can also use this with parentheses; for example, food!(burger || sandwich) to search for food but exclude both burger and sandwich.

Parentheses

Allows you to group logic statements and ensure your query is specific enough for your purposes. Using a string like ticket and (cost or sale or price) not (popcorn) allows us to define exactly what we want to tag—ticket sales information.

Exact Operators

Exact operator pairs such as “”, «», and 「」, are used to match terms exactly as written. For example, searching “ice cream” would turn up responses with that exact phrasing, but not a response with “ice creams” or “ice-cream” or other similar, lemmatized results. Furthermore, reserved keywords such as and, or, and not can be searched for within exact operators (e.g. “not”). To search for double quotes, include a pair of double quotes back to back (e.g. “”””). For example, “””not happy””” will match I am “not happy” but not I am not happy.

Near Operators

Sometimes you won’t want an exact phrase, but for words to show up close in a sentence together. For example, you’re interested in complaints of slow internet, but don’t want to tag a response where maybe someone mentions the internet and complains about slow dining service in the same response. You can specify how close words are together using ~#.

For example, search “internet slow”~2 to find responses where “internet” and “slow” are a maximum of 2 words apart.

Qtip: Searching ~3 would qualify results where the words were 1, 2, or 3 words apart. Searching ~1 would only qualify results where the words were 1 word apart or right next to each other.

You can also find more examples in the Text section by clicking the information button next to the search bar.

Query Builder

Qualtrics will also offer you Related Terms as you search to help you build better topics. These terms are suggested based on the English Language Model and frequency of co-occurrence between these terms in the data set.

Using Related Terms

1. Navigate to the search bar.
2. Type in the words or phrases of interest.
   
3. Click on Related Terms as they appear to add them to your search. They will be added at the end of the query.
   

Recommended Topics

Qualtrics will recommend topics to you based on terms that frequently appear in feedback you receive. Recommended topics are available for responses in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Dutch, Thai, Simplified Chinese, and Korean.

1. Enter editing mode by clicking the pencil icon.
   
2. Topic Recommendations are listed in the upper-right, along with how often each term appears in your feedback. Click a topic you want to add.
   
3. Text iQ will show you all the results for this term. If you find you want to create a topic based on these results, click Create Topic.
   Qtip: If you don’t like a suggestion you’re given, hover over it and click the trash icon to send it to the Dismissed Topics. You can always revisit these topics by expanding the Dismissed Topics title.
   
4. If desired, change the topic name.
   
5. Click Add Topic.

Managing Topics

Expanding and Editing Topics

The search terms attached to a topic allow it to tag new responses automatically as they come in.

1. Select a term from the menu on the left.
2. Edit the search terms. Your topic may not have terms attached, in which case the search  bar will be empty. Press Enter or return on your keyboard when you’re done.
   Qtip: See the Building Complex Searches page for more details on what to enter here.
3. If you want to go back to the original, click the arrow.
4. If you want to create a whole new topic from these results, click Save as New Topic.
5. If you want to add these results to the selected topic, click Update Topic.

Deleting Multiple Topics at a Time

1. Next to All Topics, select the dropdown.
   
2. Click Select Topics to Delete.
3. Select the topics you wish to delete.
   
4. Click Delete # Selected Topics.

Renaming or Deleting one Topic at a time

Hover over a topic, click the three dots, and select either Rename Topic or Delete, depending on what you want to do to the selected topic.

Topic Menu Features

On the menu to the left, you can:

• Narrow down the topics listed by searching terms. This search has nothing to do with building topics or searching responses.
• Click the blue line to view all tagged responses (regardless of topic).
• Click the gray line to view all untagged responses.
• Click to select a topic and view its responses.

Hierarchical Topics

Parent Topics are topics that include other topics, allowing you to create a hierarchy of text topics. When you click a parent topic, all responses from the topics nested within it will appear.

You can create a parent topic or add topics to existing parent topics by doing the following:

1. Hover over the topic and click the three dots.
   
2. Select Move to.
3. Select Create New Parent Topic.
4. Name the topic.
   
5. Click Save.
6. Your parent topic has been created!
   

To move another topic to this same parent topic, just highlight the topic, click the dots, and select to Move To the existing topic. You can also drag and drop topics to organize them within your existing parent topics. Once you’ve created your parent topics, you can move your text topics by clicking on the topic and dragging it to the parent topic you want it to fall under.

Parent Topics cannot be under additional parent topics. They also cannot have queries attached.

Exporting Topics

You can export topics and their parents for use in other surveys’ text analyses.

1. Enter edit mode by clicking the pencil icon.
   
2. Click the three dots in the top right hand corner of the topics panel and select Export Topics.
   
3. Click Download.
   

This will download a JSON file of your topics.

Importing Topics

You can import topics and their parents that you created in other surveys, or you can import topics from a starter pack created by Qualtrics XM Scientists.

Importing Topics from Other Surveys

1. Export the topics from your survey with existing text analysis.
   Qtip: This file is in JSON format. We do not recommend editing this file unless you are adept at coding. While Qualtrics Support isn’t trained to help with coding, you can reach out to our user community for assistance.
2. Go to the survey where you want to add these topics.
3. Go to Text in the Data & Analysis tab.
4. Enter edit mode.
   
5. Click the three dots in the top right hand corner of the topics panel and elect Import Topics.
   
6. Select Upload file.
   
7. Click Browse and select the JSON file you exported in Step 1.
   
8. You will get a preview of the topics you’re about to import. If you’ve uploaded parents, you will be able to expand and collapse the topics underneath them. If you’re importing topics with names that already exist, the topics will be renamed with an _1 at the end to differentiate from the originals.
   
9. Click Import to confirm.

Starter Pack Topics

Do you want to get a jump start on Text iQ, but aren’t sure where to start with building topics? You can import pre-built topics developed by Qualtrics subject-matter experts.

1. Go to the survey where you want to add these topics.
2. Go to Text in the Data & Analysis tab.
3. Enter edit mode.
   
4. Click the three dots in the top right hand corner of the topics panel and elect Import Topics.
   
5. Select Starter Packs.
   
6. Select the type of topics you’d like to import.
   
7. Click headings to expand the list of topics that will be added to your responses.
   
   Qtip: You will be able narrow these topics down if you want, but not yet.
8. Click Import.
9. Edit topics as needed – for example, delete topics, rename topics, or edit the queries that define them.
   Qtip: See Managing Topics for instructions on each of these types of edits, plus more.
10. Save your changes.
    

FAQs