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How to create a free-text question with Stribe
How to create a free-text question with Stribe

Free text questions are a great way to get extra insights from your employees

Lucy Harvey avatar
Written by Lucy Harvey
Updated over a week ago

Free-text questions are open-ended questions where people are asked to provide their opinions in their own words. They’re great for getting people's opinions or getting a better sense of the context behind some of their responses.

However, eespondents can enter large amounts of text which makes analysing the responses difficult and time-consuming.

That’s why we couple our free-text questions with quantitative/scoring questions - it allows you to make full use of Stribe’s analysis tools, and reduces the time you will need to spend analysing the free-text questions.

Why use free-text follow-up questions?

Using Stribe’s free-text follow-up questions will elevate the insights you get from your surveys in a few ways:

  • Gather richer and more nuanced feedback

  • Encourage employees to share insights or suggestions that may be new ideas for improvement

  • Give employees a chance to share the reason behind their scores

  • Show employees that you value their feedback and want to hear their thoughts

  • Give employees a chance to share what’s important to them and highlight issues that you may not have considered

What if I only want to ask a free-text question?

Sometimes, you will have a free-text question in mind and no quantitative question to pair it with. To create a quantitative question you can edit the question to be a statement or close-ended question.

Some examples are:

What’s one thing we could do to improve your overall work experience?

On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with your overall work experience?

Can you describe a time when you felt particularly motivated or engaged at work?

How often do you feel motivated or engaged at work?

Can you describe a time when you felt particularly motivated or engaged at work? What contributed to that feeling?

How often do you feel motivated or engaged at work?

What challenges or obstacles do you face in your current role, and how could we support you in overcoming them?

On a scale of 1-10, how supported do you feel in overcoming challenges in your role?

You can also use Stribe’s Survey Tune to give you ideas about how you can update the question structure. Just add the free-text question you want to ask into the main question box and ask Survey Tune to check the question for you, it’ll give you ideas for questions you can use for the main (quantitative) question, and then you can use your free-text question for the follow-up question.

How to use Stribe’s free-text follow-up questions

To set up a free-text follow-up question by creating a new survey in Stribe and selecting ‘Yes’ for ‘Would you like to ask a free text follow up question?’ this will then give you the option to create your question and add Word Tiles.

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