Introduction

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Aftercare takes a relationship based approach to / coding survey responses. We believe that themes and sub-themes are best defined by the relationships between them.

Aftercare uses a tree of themes and sub-themes to code survey responses and will place the response in the most specific category.

Tree Maintenance

As new responses come in, get coded, and begin to branch out, the coding tree will quickly grow. Aftercare provides a few knobs to tune how much you want to prune the tree.

Take the wheel

Aftercare will auto-magically create new themes and sub-themes for you as responses are coded. Let your tree grow organically.

Bonsai Trees

Mould the shape you want your tree to take. Lock down the branches you want to keep and let others get auto-generated.

Manual

Manually create the themes and sub-themes and lock them down. Aftercare will not create new themes or sub-themes.

Tree Growth

Aftercare will provide sane default to grow your tree, but we also support additional growth factors. Tree growth is determined by a few parameters and tuning these will change the shape of your tree.

propertydescription
max levelshow tall your tree is
max codes per levelhow wide each branch gets
min codes per responsewhen create new themes, how many responses are required to do so?

Climbing the Tree

When a response is coded, Aftercare will start climbing the tree to find the right codes to visit. At every branching path, there are a lot of decisions to make. This section will give an idea of how we traverse the tree, but it is not exhaustive to the logic that goes into making these decisions.

1

Data Quality

Is the response gibberish? Are there multiple components to the response that could be interpreted as different themes?

2

Evaluate

Does this response match any of the existing themes? Should we create a new theme? Can we create a new theme?

3

Repeat

Determine if we should repeat the process for each branch.