Thematic analysis

Thematic analysis groups the answers to your open-ended questions into themes, so you can see what customers are talking about — and how often — without reading every response. Use them to answer questions like:

• What do customers mention most right after a purchase?
• Are complaints about shipping growing week over week?
• What's hiding in the "Anything else?" box?

How it works

Scope reads every answer to an open-ended question and groups responses that talk about the same thing. AI writes a short title and summary for each group; the counts and percentages always come straight from your responses.

Discovery starts automatically once a question collects open-ended responses, and themes are refreshed as new responses arrive — roughly once a day. Themes also feed the Key insights summary on your dashboard, so a growing theme can surface there as a highlight.

On the question widget, the theme chart shows the top five themes for the selected date range, plus an Others bucket for smaller themes and responses that didn't match any theme. Bars are colored by sentiment: green for positive themes, red for negative, blue for neutral.

Discovered vs. custom themes

There are two kinds of themes:

• Discovered themes are found automatically. As your responses evolve, discovery may rename, replace, or reorganize them to stay honest about what's in the data.
• Custom themes (marked with a Custom badge) belong to you. Their title and description never change unless you change them, and they survive every refresh — which makes them the right tool for tracking a topic over time.

Managing themes

Open the question's menu on your dashboard and choose Manage themes. From there you can:

Create your own theme

Add a theme with a title and a description. The description does double duty: it's shown under the theme in the chart, and it's what Scope uses to decide which responses belong. Describe the content you want to capture, for example:

Shipping — delivery speed, shipping cost, tracking, delays, lost packages

Make a discovered theme permanent

Edit a discovered theme to take ownership of it. It becomes a custom theme that keeps matching exactly the same responses — under your title and description — and is no longer touched by discovery, so its history stays continuous.

Merge two themes

When discovery produces near-duplicates (say, Fast shipping and Quick delivery), merge one into the other. The combined theme keeps both groups of responses and continues to match both kinds going forward.

Split a theme

When one theme mixes two topics (say, shipping delays and discount codes), split it in two. Scope divides the responses into the two strongest sub-topics and names the new half. A theme needs at least a few responses to split, and themes whose responses are all alike can't be split.

Hide a theme

Click the eye icon — on the chart or in the theme manager — to hide a theme. A hidden theme stays right where it is on the chart, just dimmed: nothing reorders and no percentages change, since shares are always measured against all responses in the date range. What hiding does is filter the theme's responses out of the responses table and tell the Key insights summary to skip it. Useful for noise you don't want clouding the view, like "n/a" answers.

Delete a theme

Custom themes can be deleted. Their responses aren't lost — they flow back to the next best matching theme, or into Others. Discovered themes can't be deleted (discovery would just find them again); hide them instead.

Hiding a discovered theme?

Discovered themes can be replaced whenever themes refresh, which also resets their hidden state. If you want a theme to stay hidden for good, edit it first to make it permanent, then hide it.