This article will give you tips on how to analyze responses from an ex-cult member survey about harassment or stalking using the right AI-powered tools and approaches for survey response analysis.
Choosing the right tools for survey data analysis
The tools and approach you need for analyzing ex-cult member survey responses depends on the form of your data.
Quantitative data: If you’re working with structured data—like tallying how many respondents picked certain options—simple tools like Excel or Google Sheets will get the job done easily. Counting choices and basic stats are straightforward here.
Qualitative data: If your survey includes open-ended responses or follow-up questions, manual review is overwhelming and inefficient. That’s where AI tools become essential: they quickly surface patterns, themes, and insights from text that would take hours for a human to sort.
When it comes to qualitative responses, you have two main approaches for tooling:
ChatGPT or similar GPT tool for AI analysis
Basic option: You can copy your exported survey data and paste it into ChatGPT (or another GPT-based tool) and start chatting about the content.
Convenience caveat: The process can get messy. Exporting, formatting, pasting, and dealing with context size limits makes it less than smooth—especially with larger respondent sets or if you have follow-up questions attached to primary responses.
Limited feature-set: You don’t get dedicated survey features (like seeing how themes vary by question or filtering by respondent). All analysis is manual and needs clear prompting each time.
All-in-one tool like Specific
Purpose-built experience: Specific is an AI tool designed for collecting and analyzing survey data—so everything is managed in one place, from launching the conversational survey to exploring insights.
Quality through follow-ups: When collecting responses, Specific automatically asks relevant AI-powered follow-up questions. This leads to richer, more nuanced responses—especially important when interviewing ex-cult members on sensitive topics like harassment or stalking. Learn how AI follow-up questions work.
Automated analysis: The AI instantly summarizes responses and highlights key themes. No spreadsheets, no manual sorting, and no exporting required. You can analyze and chat with the AI about your data—just like ChatGPT but with direct access to all your survey conversations and advanced filtering. Read more about AI survey response analysis.
Extra features: Control exactly which questions and responses the AI analyzes. Flexible filters, multiple analysis chats, and easy exporting give you full control without the hassle.
Want a ready-to-use survey? Try the AI survey generator preset for harassment or stalking among ex-cult members: ex-cult member harassment/stalking survey generator, or learn how to create your own AI-powered survey.
Industry-leading tools like NVivo, MAXQDA, Atlas.ti, Looppanel, and Delve all offer AI-driven analysis for qualitative data sets.[1][2][3] These are robust, but they come with complexity and learning curves—especially compared to integrated survey and analysis solutions like Specific.
Useful prompts that you can use to analyze ex-cult member harassment or stalking survey data
If you're analyzing qualitative data—whether in ChatGPT, Specific, or another AI platform—your prompts shape the outcome. Here are the most helpful ones you can use for ex-cult member surveys:
Prompt for core ideas: This is the go-to for surfacing key topics and themes from a large batch of responses:
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
AI works better with context: The more you tell the AI about your survey goals, the richer the insights it gives. For example:
This survey explores the experiences of ex-cult members with harassment or stalking. It collects both direct experiences and perceptions, and includes sensitive content. My aim is to understand common patterns, triggers, and support needs to improve future interventions.
Dive deeper into a theme: Use this when you want more on a specific idea:
Tell me more about "Feeling of isolation" (core idea)
Find references to a topic: Quickly check if anyone mentioned something specific:
Did anyone talk about threats from leadership? Include quotes.
Map out personas: This is helpful to see the range of experiences:
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.
Identify pain points: Spot recurring challenges and issues:
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.
Other useful techniques include sentiment analysis, surfacing unmet needs, and listing participant suggestions:
• Sentiment Analysis: "Assess the overall sentiment expressed in the survey responses. Highlight key phrases or feedback that contribute to each sentiment category."
• Suggestions & Unmet Needs: "Identify and list all suggestions, ideas, or requests. Organize by topic or frequency. Examine the survey responses to uncover unmet needs, gaps, or opportunities for improvement."
You can combine and rephrase prompts as needed—AI is flexible, so start broad and get more specific as you go.
How qualitative data analysis works in Specific (by type of question)
Open-ended questions: The AI summarizes all responses (and any related follow-ups), distilling the essence of what ex-cult members have shared about harassment or stalking.
Choices with follow-ups: Every answer option gets its own summary—the AI groups all responses that picked the same choice and surfaces what was said in follow-ups for each. This makes patterns by group or experience visible at a glance.
NPS questions: If you use Net Promoter Score to measure perceptions, the AI breaks responses into detractors, passives, and promoters—delivering tailored summaries for each category based on their follow-ups.
You could technically do this breakdown in ChatGPT, but it’s much more hands-on—you’ll need to organize, merge, and prompt for each segment yourself.
Learn about the survey editor powered by AI, or read more on the best questions for ex-cult member harassment/stalking surveys.
How to tackle AI context size limits when working with large response sets
AI tools have a context size limit: if your survey has hundreds of responses, you can’t feed everything into the AI at once. I recommend two ways to get around this (both built-in to Specific):
Filtering: Focus the analysis on conversations where people answered certain key questions or made a particular choice. This narrows down the data fed to the AI and gives you targeted insights—without cutting important context.
Cropping: Select which survey questions to include in the AI analysis. Rather than analyze every single question, just send the most relevant ones. This maximizes the number of conversations you can process, while staying inside the model’s memory window.
You can use similar tactics if pasting data into ChatGPT—just manually filter or split up your content. But having this functionality in-platform saves hours.
Collaborative features for analyzing ex-cult member survey responses
Collaborating on analyzing sensitive, complex data—like harassment or stalking incidents from ex-cult members—poses unique challenges. Editing analysis, tracking who is doing what, and keeping findings organized can get messy fast.
AI analysis chat for teams: In Specific, you can chat with AI about your survey data. This feels natural and enables analysts, moderators, and collaborators to ask their own questions and dissect findings in real time.
Multiple simultaneous chats: You’re not limited to a single conversation. Set up themed analysis threads (e.g., one for "perpetrator patterns", one for "support experiences"), with their own filters and goals. Each chat logs who started it, so you know the origin and intent behind each analysis session.
Personalized visibility: When collaborating, avatars mark who contributed what. No more confusion about which insights came from which researcher—essential for rigorous analysis, especially on delicate topics like harassment among ex-cult members.
Clear history tracking: All chats are saved in your workspace. You always know the rationale behind each question, and can return to previous AI explorations. This helps when sharing findings with stakeholders, advocacy groups, or mental health professionals connected to ex-cult communities.
Create your ex-cult member survey about harassment or stalking now
Start collecting deep, actionable insights with AI-driven conversation surveys and instant qualitative analysis—so you can focus on supporting ex-cult members and uncovering paths to real change.