Analyzing (Online) Survey Data with Closed and Open-Ended Questions

Abstract

Surveys often contain closed questions with predefined responses and open questions for free text responses to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The result of a survey like this is almost always a data matrix in a “Cases × Questions” format, which provides one row for each respondent and contains at least one column per question. The issue then arises as to how a data matrix of this kind, which could easily contain several hundred or thousand cases in the rows and a few hundred columns, may be imported—and meaningfully analyzed—in MAXQDA. Since many surveys are conducted online these days, you might also want to import surveys from tools such as LimeSurvey, Qualtrics, or SurveyMonkey. Whether the survey was conducted online or on paper, the great advantage of analyzing survey data with MAXQDA is that qualitative data imported as text and quantitative data imported as case variables can not only be separated but also analyzed in an integrated manner, that is, in the form of a mixed methods analysis.