Responses vs Respondents? What is the correct practice? | XM Community
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Responses vs Respondents? What is the correct practice?

  • August 25, 2022
  • 1 reply
  • 392 views

DeepDiver
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I have been a qualtrics user for sometime but recently started to help research team. I am not a researcher so pardon my ignorance here. I am seeing our team is overly passionate about reporting how many 'people' responded to the survey. Now when I look qualtrics data, it shows 'responses'. Some questions in the survey offers more than one choice options.This means one responded can have multiple 'responses'. I see survey report shows XX responses for one question but then somewhere we have YY responses. Is there a way to see Total respondents or responses? I am going crazy and very nervous about how do I make a sane statement if I get asked 'How many people responded' or total How many responses we got? Can I report highest number of responses as Total? (even though the number starts to reduce). Help Help before I start pulling my hair :-)

1 reply

TomG
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  • Level 8 ●●●●●●●●
  • 6083 replies
  • August 26, 2022

For the vast majority of surveys a response and a respondent are the same thing. You set up the survey so a respondent can only take the survey once. Multi-select questions don't change the number of responses (the base size), it just means respondents can select multiple answers. You can compare the percentages of people that selected each answer, but the percentages for all the answers won't add to 100 like they do with a single select.