Comparison Report Tutorial

What is a Comparison Report?

A Comparison Report allows you to view your summarized data broken down by group. A group would be any question in your survey (such as Organization, Gender, Occupation, Question 42, etc). This means you'll be able to see a side by side breakdown of your summarized data, based on the question of your choice.

Why would you want to use it?

When analyzing your data, you may want to focus on one specific question on your survey, and how it compares to the rest of your questions. The comparison report allows you to do this, and unlike some of our other reports, it also allows you to view your summarized data broken down by group with open-ended questions. This will allow you to better analyze your text-box questions.

A great example use of a Comparison Report would be demographic information. If you have a question in your survey that asks for an employee's department, and you'd like to see how satisfied they are with the office's break room setup, you could choose "department" as your source question on the report.

You can then see which department favors the breakroom setup more, and what each department said about it!

Creating a Comparison Report

To create a Comparison Report, go to the Project tab-->Analyze & Report

1. Click on Comparison (Beta) 

- Please note: This is still in Beta testing mode, so if you run into any problems, please let us know!

 

A pop-up window will appear that will allow you to initially customize your report.

2. Customize your Report

• Report Title: Name your report something that will be easy for you to remember so you can track it down in the future.
• Include Essay & Open Ended Questions?: If you have essay or text-box questions in your survey and want to include them, you can do so by toggling the option to "Yes, include all questions."
• What field do you want to group by?: This will be the question you use to break your data into groups to compare with your other questions.

For Example: If you have a Gender question already built in your survey, and would like to see how every question in your survey breaks down by what your respondent chose in the Gender section, you would choose Gender from the drop-down.

At this time, there are only specific question types that are compatible as source questions. They are as follows: here are a list of them:

• Radio Button (simple)

• Dropdown Menu (simple)

• Likert Scale

3. Be sure to click "Create Report" once complete.

(This will automatically bring you into the Edit Tab).

 

 

 **Please note! You'll notice that the question you decided to group by is not included in the Edit list.**

In the above example, you'll see that my question "Your Survey Question" was not included even though it's the first question in the survey. The is so you are not getting irrelevant data like comparing the same question with the same question!

 

Inside the edit tab, you can do the same thing you would normally do with a Summary Report:

Add Question/Chart/Item: All questions should be included in the Comparison Report by default (only exception is if you chose to include Open Ended Questions or not in the initial customization section). If you accidentally delete an element you didn't mean to however, you can use this button to re-add it.

Add All Questions: All questions should be included in the Comparison Report by default (only exception is if you chose to include Open Ended Questions or not in the initial customization section). If you accidentally delete all your elements however, you can use this button to bring back all of them.

Reorder your elements: Using the blue arrow, you can drag your elements to higher or lower positions on the report.

Copy an element: If you need a duplicate of one of your question elements, you can copy them by clicking the small paper icon to the right of each element.

Delete an element: If you do not need all of your question elements (within the report), you can remove them by using the small red X to the right of each element.

Edit an element:   **At this time, this particular feature is broken. We're very sorry! We will hopefully have it up and running in the near future. **

 

 

4. Once you have completed customizing your report, go to your Run/View Report tab and click "Run Report Now" (or Refresh Data)

Analyzing your Comparison Report Data

Once your Comparison Report has finished running, you'll see your "Grouped by" source question as the first part of a table, and then the other questions in your survey as the second part of each table. The questions will be separated one by one with the source question, so you'll see a new table for each question in your survey. For question types that are multi-dimensional such as table of radio buttons, you'll see multiple tables (one for each column/row header).

 

When analyzing your data, you'll notice that some question types look different than others. Below we will indicate which question types will display specific ways on the Comparison Report.

In the example below, the source question was a radio button question that was set up as such:

Open Ended Questions: (Textbox, Essay, List of Textboxes, etc)

You'll see there will be three columns.

1st Column: This is your source question that the report is grouped by.

 -- This will break down each individual answer option

2nd Column: This will be the count of how many people answered the comment in 3rd Column (in open-ended question types this will generally be 1).

3rd Column: This is the text that was filled into the question.

 

The report will show you how the textbox question was broken down by answers in the source question.

For example:

Of the people that answered #1 to "Your Survey Question", there were 3 responses in the text box question: "asdasd" and "Random" and "rswsdf"

 

 

Single Select Questions: (Radio Button, Dropdown Menu, Image Choice (Single), Likert Scale)

For single select questions, you'll see as many columns as there are answer options in the question you're grouping (plus 1 for the source question). In this case, there are 2 answer options in this Radio Button Question:

Radio Button

o RB Option 1

o RB Option 2

 

 *Note*: In this instance, since this was not an open text box question, it will not have any comments, but just the count for each answer option of the Radio Button question.

It will then compare how many responses were answered in a specific option in the "Your Survey Question" with how many were answered in the question "Radio Button"

Example:

So in the above example, there were 5 responses answered for the option "RB Option 1", but only  3 answered "1" to "Your Survey Question"

**Please Note**: Generally the number in the total section should equal the number of your respondents to the survey. This question was required, and I had 7 responses, so the 5+2 in the total should come out to a total of 7.

 

Multiple Select Questions: (Checkbox, Image Select Multiple)

For Multi-Select Questions (similar to Single Select Questions) you'll see as many columns as there are answer options  in the question you're grouping (plus 1 for the source question).             

In this case, there are 4 answer options in this Checkbox Question:

Checkbox

[] CB Option 1

[] CB Option 2

[] CB Option 3

[] CB Option 4

*Note*: In this instance, since this was not an open text box question, it will not have any comments, but just the count for each answer option of the Radio Button question.

It will then compare how many responses for a specific option in the "Your Survey Question" were answered, and how many were answered inthe Checkbox question options.

 

Example:

.

 So in the above example, there were 7 responses answered for the option "CB Option 1", but only  1 answered "3" to "Your Survey Question"

Similarly, there were 3 responses to "CB Option 3" but only 2 answered "2" to "Your Survey Question".

**Please Note**: For multi-select questions, the number in the total section will most likely not equal the number of respondents who completed the survey. The reason being is that you multiple select questions are allowed to have more that one answer chosen, and so it is very rare that the total of boxes checked will equal the total of respondents.

Multi-Dimensional Questions: (Table of Radio Buttons, Table of Checkboxes, Table of Dropdown Menus, List of Dropdown Menus, Star Ranking, Custom Group, Custom Table)

 

For Multi-Dimensional Questions, you'll see as many columns as there are answer options in the question you're grouping (plus 1 for the source question). However, you will also see multiple tables based on the number of rows in the question.

In this case, there are 3 answer options for each drop-down menu, and 2 Columns within the table. The original question is below:

 

• This will compare how many responses for a specific option in the source questions were answered, and how many answered the table of dropdown menus question options.

Example:

 So in the above example, for Row DDM Row 2, there were absolutely no responses for DDM Answer 1.

Next however, you can see that out of the 3 responses to "DDM Answer 3", 1 of them answered "1" to "Your Survey Question".

 

Report Incompatible Question types:

At this time we have a few question types that do not work within the report once it's been run, but we hope to have it up soon!

• Drag and Drop Ranking
• Table Ranking
• Continuous Sum

 

Additional note:  The "Generate Test data" button on the Distribute tab will not work with the Comparison Report, it will not provide the right information as it does not adhere to things like radio buttons, validation, and piping. If you'd like to test the survey, I would recommend taking the survey live (or manually entering test data through a test link).

 

Related Report Links:

Summary Reports:

https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/448905-creating-a-summary-report

Cross-tab Reports:

https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/20469816-cross-tab-reports

Profile Report:

https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/20639287-profile-report

TURF Report:

https://support.surveygizmo.com/entries/448908-creating-a-turf-report

Have questions? Want to comment on this? Join the discussion on our SurveyGizmo Support site.