This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an ex-cult member survey about anxiety symptoms. If you want straightforward strategies and practical prompts, you’re in the right place.
Choosing the right tools for survey response analysis
The approach—and the tools you’ll need—depend directly on the form of your survey data. Are you tracking numbers and counts, or are you going deep into personal stories and nuanced explanations?
Quantitative data: If you have closed-ended questions (like “How often do you feel anxious?” with options to pick from), tallying up responses is simple using Excel, Google Sheets, or even built-in survey platform exports.
Qualitative data: For open-ended answers—especially common in anxiety symptom surveys for ex-cult members—you’ll get paragraphs of text per person. Reading all of them is nearly impossible at scale, so you need help from AI tools to discover themes and insights.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Manual upload into ChatGPT: Export your survey results as text or CSV, then copy and paste the data directly into ChatGPT (or a similar model) for conversation.
This approach is accessible but not seamless. Managing exports, pasting, and keeping track of prompts can become clunky fast—especially with large sets of nuanced responses. You’ll also have to be cautious of privacy since some platforms store conversation history.
Context is limited. Very large surveys may not fit within the context window of the AI, forcing you to work in chunks.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built for survey data, Specific combines both collection and AI-powered analysis in a single platform. You build your conversational survey—perfect for topics as sensitive as anxiety among ex-cult members—and responses are structured for instant analysis.
Follow-up questions boost quality. During data collection, Specific’s AI asks smart follow-ups—gathering deeper context automatically, resulting in richer data than a typical survey. Read more about this feature in our overview of automatic AI follow-up questions.
Instant AI analysis. With one click, Specific summarizes responses, highlights the main themes, and surfaces actionable insights, all powered by GPT. No manual downloads or spreadsheet wrangling.
Conversational interface. You can chat with the AI about your results, just like with ChatGPT, but with additional controls to filter which conversations and questions the AI considers. Learn more in our AI survey response analysis deep dive.
If you want to start from scratch, the AI survey generator for ex-cult member anxiety surveys gives you a ready-made prompt template.
Takeaway: For sensitive contexts like anxiety symptoms in ex-cult members, structured tools with built-in AI give you more reliability, privacy, and richer insights—backed by real studies showing that over 83% of former cultists report anxiety, and 93% have had anxiety attacks. [1][2]
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze ex-cult member anxiety symptoms survey data
When working with qualitative survey data, the magic is in the prompts—especially if your audience has traumatic or highly nuanced experiences. Below are prompt examples that deliver consistent, actionable results whether you’re using ChatGPT, another AI, or Specific’s built-in chat analysis.
Prompt for core ideas: Use this for discovering big themes from a large set of responses (such as explanations of anxiety triggers or patterns across experiences). It’s also what powers Specific’s built-in analysis chat, but you can use it anywhere:
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
Give more context to AI for better results. For example, describe your survey purpose and your goals:
Analyze these survey responses from former cult members about anxiety symptoms. My goal is to identify major patterns, pain points, and suggestions for support programs.
If a core idea stands out, try: "Tell me more about XYZ (core idea)" to ask for more depth on that point.
Prompt for specific topics: If you want to check if survivors mention “nightmares” or “panic attacks,” use:
Did anyone talk about panic attacks? Include quotes.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: This gets you a list of recurring struggles, with frequency and quotes:
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 personas: Great for identifying subgroups among respondents (e.g., “people coping with social withdrawal,” “those needing therapy outreach”):
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 sentiment analysis: Useful if you want to map overall distress levels versus positivity in anecdotes:
Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses (e.g., positive, negative, neutral). Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category.
Explore more strategies and ready-to-use prompts with our guide on the best questions for ex-cult member anxiety surveys.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific adapts its AI summaries based on question logic—no matter how you structured your survey. Here’s what you get for each style:
Open-ended questions (with or without follow-ups): A full summary of every respondent’s answer, bundled with summaries of follow-up replies linked to that main question.
Choice questions with follow-ups: Each selected option gets a separate summary for the responses and follow-up answers related to that choice. This helps you break down anxiety triggers or coping strategies tied to certain experiences.
NPS questions: Detractors, passives, and promoters each have their own summary of follow-up responses, so you can see pain points or advocacy themes by segment. If you’re curious, try spinning up a ready-made NPS survey for ex-cult members.
You can replicate this style of analysis manually in ChatGPT—it just requires more copying, chunking, and keeping track of your threads.
Dealing with AI context size limits (when surveys are large)
All large language models come with a “context limit”: how much information you can send for analysis at one time. When dozens or hundreds of ex-cult members respond with detailed narratives, you’ll likely hit those boundaries.
Filtering: Narrow results by respondent segment or by answers to certain questions. In Specific, you can easily analyze just the subset of conversations where people describe severe anxiety or mention specific triggers.
Cropping: Reduce the number of questions considered at once. Send only the most relevant question(s) to the AI for summary, which allows for deeper dives into each topic—without losing respondents due to context overload.
These filters let you go deeper where it matters, without having the AI “forget” key points from earlier in the dataset.
Collaborative features for analyzing ex-cult member survey responses
Collaborating on survey analysis is rarely straightforward—especially when each researcher or team member has their own angle (support needs, symptom patterns, program feedback).
Chat-based analysis with filters. In Specific, you analyze survey data simply by chatting with the AI—applying filters for things like NPS score or mention of specific symptoms—so each chat stays focused on its own theme.
Multiple chats, multiple perspectives. You can create several analysis chats, each with its unique filters and focus. This way, different team members can explore their questions (such as identifying who’s struggling the most with social reintegration) in parallel, without losing their place.
Clear team collaboration. Each chat displays who created it—and every message in the discussion shows the sender’s avatar. This keeps everyone synced as you share findings or prepare outreach plans for survivors struggling most with anxiety.
Create your ex-cult member survey about anxiety symptoms now
Start gathering deeper insights immediately and let AI handle the heavy lifting—turning raw survey data into clear, actionable support strategies, all with privacy and ease.