This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses/data from ex-cult member surveys about contact with former group. If you're trying to make sense of these nuanced conversations, especially using an AI survey, here’s how to get real insights fast using smart tools.
Choosing the right tools for response analysis
The approach and tooling for analyzing ex-cult member survey responses about contact with former group depends on the form and structure of your collected data. Here’s how you can tackle both quantitative and qualitative answers:
Quantitative data: Structured responses—like “How many people said yes?”, ratings, or multiple choice answers—are easy to count, chart, or segment using Excel, Google Sheets, or any basic stats tool. You can break down the numbers by age, location, or types of contact at a glance.
Qualitative data: Open-ended or follow-up responses—like stories, motivations, or detailed feedback—can be overwhelming. Reading dozens or hundreds of these manually is impossible if you want to see the big picture. That’s where AI tools shine, extracting key themes, sentiment, and context you’d miss on your own.
There are two approaches for tooling when dealing with qualitative responses:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Manual copy-paste to ChatGPT works—but it’s basic. You can export your open-ended survey responses (say, as a CSV or text file) and paste chunks into ChatGPT or another GPT model. Inside ChatGPT, you can ask broad or specific questions to summarize responses, identify themes, or search for patterns.
Drawbacks: This approach is not convenient for larger data sets. You must break data into smaller pieces due to context window limits, and it can get messy managing multiple chats, prompt variations, or follow-ups. There’s no built-in way to link analysis back to actual respondent profiles or survey logic, so it’s easy to lose context.
If you’re looking to explore this path, it gives you a hands-on, flexible way to analyze—but expect some friction and extra labor to keep things organized.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Specific is built for the full loop: collect and analyze data in one flow. It not only runs your conversational survey (with smart AI follow-up questions), but instantly summarizes all open-ended responses using GPT-powered analysis. Every open response, choice, or follow-up is distilled into core insights with just a few clicks—no spreadsheets or messy exports to manage.
The advantage:
Each answer gets richer thanks to automatic probing—see the AI follow-up questions feature for details.
When ready for analysis, jump straight into an AI-powered summary chat. Ask for themes, pain points, or “Show me everything related to coping after leaving.” There’s no manual cleaning or sorting—everything is structured and ready to explore by filters, tags, or question type.
Compare different subgroups (e.g., those who kept in touch vs. those who didn’t) directly in the chat interface—no manual grouping required.
You can edit or create new surveys using the Ex-Cult Member survey generator for contact with former group to further streamline the entire process.
Other advanced AI-powered analysis tools like NVivo, MAXQDA, Delve, Canvs AI, and InfraNodus are also popular for deep-dive qualitative research. They offer features like automated coding, theme detection, sentiment/emotion analysis, and collaborative reviews, helping reveal patterns buried in large volumes of narrative feedback, as seen in ex-cult member survey data. [1][2][3]
Choose your approach based on your comfort with tools, the size of your data, and the level of depth you want in your analysis.
Useful prompts to analyze ex-cult member survey responses on contact
With the right prompts, you can quickly dive into qualitative survey analysis—whether you're using ChatGPT, Specific, or any modern AI survey analysis tool. Here are some of the most practical, time-saving prompts for ex-cult member survey data on contact with former groups:
Prompt for core ideas
This is ideal for condensing lots of free-text answers. Put in a whole export or filtered set of responses, and ask:
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
Add more context for better quality. AI analysis always improves if you briefly describe your survey, who answered, and your purpose. For example:
I'm analyzing responses from a survey of ex-cult members about their experiences in contacting former group members. Please focus on the reasons, emotions, and challenges mentioned, with an eye toward recovery and support network formation.
Prompt for deeper exploration: Once you have a list of themes or core ideas, dig deeper with:
Tell me more about [core idea]
Prompt for specific topic:
Did anyone talk about [specific issue or keyword]? Include quotes.
Prompt for pain points and challenges: Make sense of struggles ex-cult members face in reconnecting (or avoiding contact):
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: Understand the range of lived experiences and perspectives:
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: To capture overall tone or outlook (e.g., negative, positive, neutral) in responses about former group contact:
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.
All of these prompts can be adapted for use with any large text conversation set—start broad, then drill into areas that matter for your research goals.
How Specific analyzes qualitative data by question type
Specific takes the heavy lifting out of structuring and summarizing responses, whether your survey includes open-ended questions, multiple choice with follow-ups, or NPS (Net Promoter Score) for ex-cult member research.
Open-ended questions with or without follow-ups: Specific generates an instant high-level summary for every question and related follow-ups. It clusters answers into core ideas and provides explainers, all in a single view.
Choices with follow-ups: For every choice (for instance, “never contacted my former group” vs. “maintained regular contact”), Specific summarizes all related follow-up responses, so you know not just the selections, but the reasons and patterns behind them.
NPS (Net Promoter Score): If you use an NPS-style question, Specific automatically breaks out summaries and analysis for promoters, passives, and detractors, showing unique themes for each group.
You can do similar breakdowns manually in ChatGPT or other AI platforms—it just takes more steps, like copying, filtering, and prompt crafting for each segment. Specific automates all of this, so your time is spent interpreting findings, not wrangling data. Check out this guide on the best questions to ask in ex-cult member surveys to ensure you’re capturing the right data from the start.
Dealing with large data sets and AI context limits
Working with AI for survey response analysis has context size limits: if your ex-cult member survey has hundreds of detailed responses, you can't stuff all of them into a single prompt. To overcome this, there are two proven strategies:
Filtering: Only conversations where users replied to select questions, or chose specific answers, will be passed to the AI for analysis. This lets you zoom in on contact, emotion, or coping-related answers.
Cropping: You can crop which questions are sent to the AI, focusing on the most relevant parts (like all follow-ups on “how did your first contact go?”). This keeps you under context limits and helps the AI deliver targeted summaries—no more hitting message length errors.
Specific deeply integrates both filtering and cropping into its workflow, making them seamless even for first-time users. Manual tools like ChatGPT, or research platforms like NVivo or MAXQDA, let you do this too—but require setup and discipline to keep your export and prompt scope tidy. For more on this, see how Specific manages AI analysis of large survey data sets.
Collaborative features for analyzing ex-cult member survey responses
Collaboration is often the biggest barrier when teams analyze ex-cult member survey responses about contact with former groups. Everyone brings unique perspectives and expertise, but merging insights without losing context—or just seeing who asked what—gets messy.
With Specific, collaboration is built into the workflow. You analyze data simply by chatting with AI (as a team or alone). Each analysis chat can have its own filters, segmentation (e.g., “let’s only look at those disconnected for 5+ years”), and focus area—think of them like flexible workspaces. You instantly see which chats were created by which teammates, so it’s easy to pick up where others left off, or compare takes on the same question.
Transparency matters: In every AI analysis chat, messages are tagged with the sender’s avatar, so every insight or follow-up thread is traceable. This ensures everyone’s questions, prompts, and findings are clear, eliminating confusion or duplicated effort.
Because these collaborative features are real-time, you can turn feedback analysis into a living conversation—perfect for multidisciplinary teams or communities working together to interpret the lived experiences of ex-cult members. Related: here’s a step-by-step on how to create an ex-cult member survey about contact with former group and organize collaborative review sessions.
Create your ex-cult member survey about contact with former group now
Kickstart your research and collect powerful insights effortlessly: launch an AI-driven, conversational survey that goes beyond simple forms, captures real context, and delivers actionable analysis—all in one place. Make every response count.