This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from a Citizen survey about Walkability And Sidewalks. I’ll show you practical AI techniques, prompt ideas, and how to actually get actionable insights from your survey data.
Choosing the right tools for analysis
When you analyze survey responses, your approach—and the tools you need—depend on the form and structure of your data.
Quantitative data: If you’re dealing with numbers (like how many people chose a certain answer), classic tools like Excel or Google Sheets do the job. Just tally things up, use filters and pivots—quick, familiar, and precise.
Qualitative data: But if your survey has open-ended or follow-up questions, you’re facing a mountain of text. Reading every single response, identifying patterns, and summarizing key themes is impossible manually for most surveys. That’s why you need AI tools—like GPT models—to get insights at scale and speed.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
You can use ChatGPT for basic AI-powered analysis. Export survey responses (CSV or plain text) and paste them into ChatGPT. From there, you can have conversations with the AI about your data—ask for summaries, themes, or sentiment breakdowns.
But there are real drawbacks. Copy/pasting raw survey exports breaks formatting, struggles with big data sets (context limits), and quickly becomes messy if you need to analyze by segments or compare answers by groups. Plus, privacy and data management can get tricky.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Specific is purpose-built for AI survey design and analysis, from start to finish. You can both collect Citizen responses about Walkability And Sidewalks and analyze them inside the same platform. Automatic follow-up questions improve the depth and clarity of what you collect—no scripting required. (Want to see how follow-ups work? Check out this breakdown of AI-powered follow-ups.)
Instant AI-powered analysis: As soon as responses come in, Specific uses GPT-powered analysis to summarize answers, highlight key themes, and produce actionable insights—without exporting data or wrangling spreadsheets. Instead of reading through text walls, you see concise overviews and can drill deeper as needed.
Conversational querying: You can chat directly with the AI about your survey results, exactly like in ChatGPT—but it’s structured for survey data, with powerful context and smarter filtering. You get features to manage, segment, and filter what data the AI sees, making sure your analysis is always relevant. See more on how Specific analyzes survey data with AI chat.
Want to create your own analysis-ready Citizen survey? Use our AI survey builder for Citizen walkability studies or design it from scratch with the custom prompt generator.
Useful prompts that you can use for Citizen walkability and sidewalks response analysis
Prompts are how you guide AI to extract exactly the insights you care about. Here’s a toolkit of smart prompts you can use in ChatGPT, Specific, or any other GPT-based survey analysis tool.
Prompt for core ideas: Use this when you want a quick, focused view of what respondents care about most. This prompt works especially well when analyzing themes in Citizen walkability surveys. Just paste your open-ended replies, and try:
Your task is to extract core ideas in bold (4-5 words per core idea) + up to 2 sentence long explainer.
Output requirements:
- Avoid unnecessary details
- Specify how many people mentioned specific core idea (use numbers, not words), most mentioned on top
- no suggestions
- no indications
Example output:
1. **Core idea text:** explainer text
2. **Core idea text:** explainer text
3. **Core idea text:** explainer text
Remember: AI always performs better with context. Preface the prompt with your survey details:
We ran a survey among Citizens in our city about walkability and sidewalks. Our goal is to understand the most important improvements or challenges people face when walking in the community. Analyze the replies considering this context.
You can ask follow-up prompts for more detail about any identified theme: “Tell me more about sidewalk maintenance.” or “What did people say about accessibility?”
Prompt for specific topic: Wondering if anyone brought up lighting issues, crosswalks, or new bike lanes?
Did anyone talk about sidewalk lighting? Include quotes.
Prompt for personas: To find out if you’re hearing from different “types” of Citizen respondents, use:
Based on the survey responses, identify and describe a list of distinct personas—similar to how "personas" are used in product management. For each persona, summarize their key characteristics, motivations, goals, and any relevant quotes or patterns observed in the conversations.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: Direct the AI to extract what makes walking difficult or frustrating for residents:
Analyze the survey responses and list the most common pain points, frustrations, or challenges mentioned. Summarize each, and note any patterns or frequency of occurrence.
Prompt for suggestions & ideas: To surface recommendations and creative ideas from residents:
Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests provided by survey participants. Organize them by topic or frequency, and include direct quotes where relevant.
If you want to explore more about prompts and survey flow, see our guide on how to create a Citizen survey about walkability and sidewalks or check out the best question types and approaches for these topics.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific automatically adapts its AI analysis depending on the question type in your Citizen walkability survey:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): You get a summary of all responses—including deeper insights from follow-up clarifications—so you see both the “what” and the “why.”
Multiple choice with follow-ups: Each answer choice gets its own summary, distilling the key feedback and themes from people who selected that option and answered its follow-up questions.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): For loyalty surveys, results are broken down by promoters, passives, and detractors. Each segment gets a dedicated summary highlighting what drives their opinions.
You can do this step-by-step in ChatGPT (following the prompts above), but it’s a lot more manual—especially if your survey is long or complex.
How to tackle challenges with AI context limits
One challenge with any GPT-based tool is context limit. If you paste in too many survey responses, you’ll hit a wall—the AI can only handle so much data at once. Specific tackles this with two smart solutions, but you can use similar tactics elsewhere:
Filtering: Filter your data so only relevant conversations (where users answered specific questions or selected certain options) go to the AI for analysis. That keeps input focused and context under control.
Cropping questions: Select only the questions you want AI to analyze. Sending just the important questions (not the whole survey) increases the number of conversations you can include without hitting limits.
Both methods let you efficiently analyze large Citizen walkability datasets, one slice at a time.
Collaborative features for analyzing Citizen survey responses
When multiple teams need to collaborate on Citizen walkability and sidewalk feedback, things can easily get chaotic—passing spreadsheets or pasting transcripts into shared docs means losing context and duplicating efforts.
Specific makes collaboration simple and organized. You analyze Citizen survey data just by chatting with AI. You can open multiple chats, each with its own filters or questions, and immediately see who started each analysis for full transparency. This also makes it easy to trace back results or add your own perspective on Citizen feedback related to walkability and sidewalks.
Discussion is truly collaborative: When you and colleagues discuss results in AI Chat, each message displays the sender’s name and avatar—keeping teamwork coordinated and conversations easy to follow as you dig through Citizen input, segment ideas, and refine next steps together.
Create your Citizen survey about Walkability And Sidewalks now
Get in-depth insights that actually shape your city: use Specific to collect Citizen feedback and see instant AI analysis of walkability and sidewalk concerns—no manual sorting, just clear, actionable results.