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De-identifying Responses

  • March 24, 2021
  • 2 replies
  • 702 views
A

My team works on employee engagement surveys for a global company. It has come to our attention to be in accordance with our workers councils in Europe and GDPR we need to make sure responses from our European associates are not identifiable after a year. Meaning no associate ID, or other identifiable metadata is tied to the response. As a team, we are trying to figure out a process to best de-identify results in Qualtrics. We also are thinking through how we can do this without completely messing up surveys that feed into our dashboards. If any one has any insight on best practices for this it would help us out a lot.

      2 replies

      A
      Level 2 ●●
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      • altatunc
      • Level 2 ●●
      • March 24, 2021

      My go to for something complicated like this is to probably utilize the API and make edits to the surveys on a scheduled basis. That is, you could code out a solution to delete the right data elements without interfering with other bits you need.
      This could get you started. It wouldn't necessarily be easy, but would be testable and repeatable.
      https://api.qualtrics.com/guides/reference/singleResponses.json

      AdamK12
      Level 5 ●●●●●
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      • AdamK12
      • Level 5 ●●●●●
      • March 24, 2021

      AssociateInsights altatunc As a U.S. Federal government agency, we are also careful to not solicit PII (personally identifiable information) and to remove PII from responses. There is a Qualtrics feature that will prompt respondents if they are about to enter PII into a verbatim response (such as a name, mailing address, email address, or ID number).
      To de-identify results, be sure to click the "Anonymize Responses" button under "Options" which will remove IP addresses and other identifying information from all observations.
      I hope that helps!
      Best,
      Adam

      Adam Korengold, NLM/SCI (he/him/his)
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