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Bucketing Fields

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About Bucketing Fields

You can “bucket” answers to questions into new groups. As soon as a bucketed field is created, it’s applied to existing data, and applied to all new responses going forward. Creating a bucketed field can be a great way to split out your data in different ways for reports and filters without having to make edits to an active survey.

This support page covers how to create a bucketed field. If you’d like to edit an existing bucket field, see Editing Custom Fields.

Example: Let’s say you distribute a survey internationally, asking what country each respondent lives in. Halfway through data collection, you realize you don’t just want to do analyses on the countries, but the whole continents. It’s too late to add a new question or an embedded data element that captures this information, so you bucket countries into regions.

Creating a Bucketing Field

  1. Go to the Data & Analysis tab.
    Field Editor button in top-right corner of Data & Analysis tab
  2. Select Field Editor.
  3. Click Create Field.
    create field button within field editor
  4. Select Bucketing at the top.
    Bucketing option selected in top-right corner of Create field window
  5. Name your field.
  6. Click Select Field to choose the data to bucket. You can choose from all available survey questions, survey metadata, contact fields, or embedded data.
    Qtip: You can bucket any multiple choice or numeric data. You cannot bucket other custom fields or open text data (like a standard text entry).
    Qtip: The selected field must have 200 or fewer unique values. (I.e., questions cannot have 200+ answer choices.) If the field exceeds this amount, you’ll see the message “Too Many Source Values” in the Source Values box.
  7. Name the groups your values will be sorted into.
  8. You can add more groups by clicking Add Group.
    Add Group option beneath bottom-most bucket category
  9. Drag fields from the Source Values box to the groups on the right.
    Values on the left are dragged over into bucket categories on the right

    Qtip: Note that you don’t need to have every field sorted into a group. Whenever a value isn’t sorted into a group, it’s marked Uncategorized within your new bucketed field.
  10. Click Create Field.
  11. Select Review and Publish to save your changes.
    clicking "review and publish"
  12. Click Publish your Changes.
    publish changes button in new window

    Qtip: Click Data Table to return to your response data.
    data table button at top of the field editor
Attention: Bucketing is compatible with multiple answer questions. However, only 1 group can be assigned per response. For example, if you allow respondents to choose multiple countries where they’ve lived, a field that bucketed countries into continents would only assign them the continent of their first selected answer.

Bucketing Numeric Ranges

When the field you’re trying to bucket is numeric in format, you divide your buckets into numeric ranges instead of the categorical groups described in the previous section.

Example: You want to create buckets for a range of answers to your slider or numeric text entry.

Create buckets using range of numbers

  1. Set the minimum and maximum numerical value for each bucket.
  2. The names of your bucket will adjust to match the numerical ranges, but you can also enter whatever name you’d like here. These names will appear as the answers to the new bucket field once it’s created.
  3. Add the desired number of buckets by clicking Add group. Buckets can be removed by clicking the “x” on the right side of the bucket.
  4. When you’re finished, click Create Field.
Qtip: Even if an embedded data field is saved in a numeric format, it will always behave like a categorical bucket instead. Multiple choice questions will also always behave as categorical buckets, even if they’re recoded.

Projects Where You Can Bucket Fields

Depending on your license, you may have access to several different types of projects that have a Data & Analysis tab. The options described on this page are available in:

Qtip: When custom fields are added to a CX Dashboard, they become derived data. Although supported, they behave a little differently than other survey fields do. See Derived Data for more details.

While the functionality is technically available, we do not recommend using these custom fields with other types of Employee Experience projects. See Creating New Fields (EX) for more details.

Qtip: While other areas of the platform (like dashboards, Stats iQ, and directories) may also allow you to create new fields, this support page is solely focused on how to create new custom fields in Data & Analysis. For steps on creating other kinds of fields across the XM platform, try narrowing your support site search.

FAQs