Theme Configuration in TextAI

Theme Configuration in QuestionPro TextAI helps you review and manage the themes and sub-themes generated from open-ended responses. From this dashboard, you can search responses, filter by individual or multiple sub-themes, explore raw coded data, and review response distribution across your dataset.

The configuration workflow also lets you refine the AI-generated structure by creating new themes and sub-themes, merging related sub-themes, assigning responses manually, removing tags, and running recoding. This gives teams more control over how qualitative feedback is categorized before continuing with deeper analysis.

Watch this video for a quick overview of Theme Configuration in TextAI:

• Hover over the TextAI dashboard name in the dashboard list and click the Theme Configuration icon from the available actions.


• Alternatively, open the TextAI dashboard, click the Settings icon in the top-right corner, and select Theme Configuration from the available options.


• Use the search bar to filter responses by keyword.


• Select single or multiple sub-themes when you want to filter responses across several categories.


• Review the Explore Raw Data section on the right side of the dashboard.


• Use the response distribution view to see how responses are spread across sub-theme counts.


• Click the filter reset icon to clear applied filters.


• Use the pagination controls to navigate between response pages. Click the expand icon to open the response section in a larger view.


• Click the same icon again to collapse the response section.

Themes are top-level categories that organize related feedback patterns in TextAI. Create a new theme when the current theme structure does not fully represent an important group of responses in your dataset.

• Click Edit Mode to enable the controls for managing themes and sub-themes in the Theme Configuration dashboard.


• Click New Theme when the responses need a broader top-level category. A theme acts as the main group that can contain multiple related sub-themes.


• Enter a clear theme name and click Create to save the theme. The new theme becomes available for organizing existing or newly created sub-themes.

Sub-themes are more specific categories within a theme. Use them to capture finer patterns in responses, especially when a broad theme contains feedback that should be reviewed or reported separately.

• Click New Sub-theme when you need a more specific category under an existing theme. Sub-themes help refine broad AI-generated themes into smaller groups that better describe the responses.


• Select the parent theme, provide the new sub-theme name and description, then click Create to save the sub-theme.

Merging sub-themes helps clean up overlapping or duplicate categories. Use this option when separate sub-themes describe the same idea and should be combined into one clearer classification.

• Select the sub-themes that represent the same idea or should be analyzed together, then click Merge to start the merge flow.


• Select the destination theme, provide the merged sub-theme name and description, then click Merge to create the combined sub-theme.

Tagging responses lets you manually refine how raw responses are categorized. You can assign responses to existing sub-themes or to new sub-themes created during the configuration process.

• Select the responses that you want to tag with a sub-theme. You can tag responses with existing sub-themes or with new sub-themes created during configuration.


• Click Add Sub-Theme in the Explore Raw Data section.


• Choose the sub-theme to assign to the selected responses, then click Add to apply it.

• To remove an incorrect or unnecessary tag, click the remove icon next to the sub-theme on the response. The response remains in the raw data list, but the selected sub-theme tag is removed from that response.

After you create, merge, assign, or remove themes and sub-themes, recoding updates how TextAI applies those changes to the response data. Choose the recoding option based on whether you want to code only new categories, refresh all sub-themes, or update a selected set.

• Click Recode after making your theme and sub-theme changes. This opens the recoding options so you can decide how broadly TextAI should apply the updated configuration.
  
• Select New Sub-themes when you only want TextAI to code newly created sub-themes that do not already have tagged responses. This keeps the existing coded data unchanged while applying coding to the new categories.


• Select All Sub-themes when you want TextAI to recode the full dataset using the latest theme and sub-theme structure. This refreshes all assignments and can overwrite manual changes.


• Use Custom Selection when only specific sub-themes need to be updated. This limits recoding to the categories you choose instead of changing the full dataset.


• Click Recode Selected Sub-themes to submit the recoding request. TextAI then starts applying the selected recoding scope to the response data.


• Monitor the Recode in Progress status in the Theme Configuration panel. This status confirms that TextAI is processing the updated theme and sub-theme coding.