The Category Selector in Operations Dashboard currently allows Single choice selections and Multiple choice selections. The query operators for Multiple choice selections are "include" or "does not include." These operators do not offer the same functionality as the operators "contains" or "does not contain." ESRI Customer Support explained this to me in an email:
I've done some digging into this issue and I think I've pinpointed the confusion.The 'include' operator works as an 'equals' operator when only one value is selected, works as an 'IN' operator when multiple values are selected, but never works as a 'contains' operator. This means that the query is looking for fields that exactly match the string you've configured as the query value. The result of this is that when you select multiple values, for example [category1] AND [category2], the category selector will filter to show only features that have [category1] OR [category2] as the value for the selected field. However, a feature that has the value of [category1,category2] would not be shown because the value is not an exact match despite containing both search terms.
My idea is to add two additional operators to the Category Selector in Operations Dashboard: "contains" and "does not contain." These operators will allow querying categories that are comma-separated in a single field. (This comma-separated format is standard for Multiple Choice data from Survey123.)