finnsurveytext: Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Responses in R

The finnsurveytext R package has been created to facilitate the analysis of responses to open-ended survey questions and other structured text data. The package offers a user-friendly, open-source tool and workflow that supports reproducible analysis of text data, including summarisation of response properties, identification of frequent words and phrases, visualisation of responses and creation of a concept network plot. The second version of the package was released in August 2024. It includes integration with the popular survey package to allow survey design to be incorporated into the analysis. While the package was created for the analysis of responses written in Finnish, it can also be used to analyse text in other languages. The tool aims to make analysing open-ended questions accessible to social science and humanities scholars without strong programming skills or extensive knowledge of Natural Language Processing methodologies. The objective is to enable the rich data obtained from responses to open-ended questions to be harnessed so that it can be better understood within the context of numeric or categorical data analysis.