Topic tagging of the free text comments in the 2023 Women’s Reproductive Health Survey for England

The 2023 Reproductive Health Survey for England (RHSE) was a commitment of the 2022 Women’s Health Strategy. 

At the end of the survey, there was a section asking those who took part if they had any further comments. Over 20,000 survey participants left comments. These comments will help to gain a deeper insight into people’s views and experiences of their reproductive health. They will help build on the quantitative survey data, where participants selected pre-defined answers, to help us better understand what is important to women and people assigned female at birth regarding their reproductive health.

We aim to produce a data set of the comments from the 2023 RHSE, tagged by reproductive health topics & concepts, for example comments relating to topics such as ‘periods’, ‘contraception’ or ‘endometriosis’ and concepts such as ‘stigma’ or ‘feeling unheard’.

We want to understand if there are any differences in the characteristics of respondents who left comments relating to their reproductive health compared to those who did not.

We will use a special computer programme to tag the comments. We will create a dictionary of tags to help with future analysis of the comments.