Responding with Emoji

Question

Hi,

Is it possible for participants to answer using emoji (for example in the free text input questions)?

Thanks a lot!

Answer 1

Yes, it is. If they are responding on the smartphone, they can simply add the emojis. If they are using a PC, its a bit more complicated. You may have to add some JavaScript library to offer the emojis, in that case.

Please also note that different statistical software may not be able to handle emojis. SoSci Survey will therefore translate emojis to text.

Comments

Thanks so much for the quick reply!

Are emojis always translated to text or is there a way to access and export the original data?

---

This is currently hard-coded in SoSci Survey, i.e. it is re-coded when collecting the data. We consider changing that, as more programs can handle UTF-8 with emojis. Yet, at the moment, there's no way to disable this emoji-to-text-encoding.

---

OK, thank you!

---

Hi again,

Just to add in case someone else is wondering about this:

I am looking at some participant data and I was very happy to see how emojis are translated to text. For example, "{EM_FACE_WITH_TEARS_OF_JOY}" - this is brilliant! It indicates that this is an emoji and it would be very easy for me to back-code it to emoji if I needed to. Very smart! This coding allows you also to be sure when they used an actual emoji as opposed to punctuation to convey emotion expressions (for example, ":)"). Now, having see how it works, I am very happy because I can recognize the emoji, I can count them (which was the initial goal), and there is an easy way to turn them back into images in case I need to!

Thanks a lot!

---

Good to hear that our solution works fine for you {EM_THUMB_UP} ;)