Started as Free Text, can I switch to quantitative? | XM Community
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Hey all,



So I started a survey that's underway, and one of the questions asks for the participant's age. I just started to look through the data and noticed that this is pretty annoying, and I should've use a different method such a slider or something. Is there a way to convert the free text into a qualitative measure? without republishing the survey? Or is this something I have to do on the back end in excel or so after I get the final data spreadsheet? Thanks.



Best,

Michael
Well, you have a lot of options here, but first I think you mean "quantitative" (as in a quantity of something - i.e. the quantity of time that has based since your birth, in years (age)) not "qualitative" (such as referring to the quality of something).



You probably want to make sure that 1) your free text question uses authentication to ensure they are entering a number from 1 - 110 (or whatever seems a reasonable age range) and 2) you probably want to group these numeric entries in to age ranges. To do the latter you can use branch logic in the Survey Flow that reads "IF _age_ is Greater Than or Equal to 1 and Les than or Equal to 18 THEN _branch to embedded data block where AGE RANGE = 1-18_" Then repeat for all appropriate age ranges.
I totally meant "quantitative", thank you for that correction.



If I went about it by changing the survey flow, would that be something I can do after the survey gets all the respondents? And qualtrics can then group answers after the fact? Or would I have to change it now and all the answers previously entered before I publish the new Flow would not be stratified into ranges?
Hello @Simoni21 ,



If I went about it by changing the survey flow, would that be something I can do after the survey gets all the respondents? - Once you get all the respondent, you can go to data and analysis tab and use Bucketing feature for this.
> @Simoni21 said:

> I totally meant "quantitative", thank you for that correction.

>

> If I went about it by changing the survey flow, would that be something I can do after the survey gets all the respondents? And qualtrics can then group answers after the fact? Or would I have to change it now and all the answers previously entered before I publish the new Flow would not be stratified into ranges?



You could do it now, and it will sort respondents from here on out but it won't sort previous respondents. Either way, you will probably need to sort them in like Excel or something then assign them to the correct variable for future downloading and reporting.

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