A student and I are writing a simple attitude questionnaire. It contains a set of 9 questions all of which allow the answers “Strongly agree”, “Agree”, “Neutral”, “Disagree” and “Strongly disagree”. 8 of the questions work perfectly well, and all 5 answer categories occur in the data. But for one of them, the answers recorded include only “Agree”, “Neutral”, “Disagree” and - bizarrely - “Click to write answer 4”; Needless to say we have not included that as a possible answer category. We have checked and the correct answer categories are presented to the respondent, but the incorrect one appears in the data spreadsheet within Qualtrics (i.e. it is not being generated at Export.” Can anyone shed light on what is going on, and how to stop it? Also, this error did not emerge until we have collected a whole lot of data, and we would love to know what answers the respondents who generate the incorrect answer were actually trying to give.
Strange responses recorded from survey
+1Best answer by TomG
I’m guessing your turned on Variable Naming (under Recode) on the questions you are having an issue with, then changed the scale after you did that. “Click to write answer 4” is probably one of the “Strongly...” answers. If that’s the case, the good news is you just need to edit your Variable Names and republish and all your data will be fixed.
Hi
I’m not sure if there is any way to guess the answers that the respondents were trying to give (in case of incorrect answer choices) but you can manually edit the collected responses, but please do it under the guidance and agreement of your team member/colleague working on this project/questionnaire, as editing the responses manually can be risky.
+1Thanks for your suggestion, omakrewat. However I don’t think that’s the case, because we trialled the survey before distribution (and I have just trialled it again) and the correct response options are offered.
+27I’m guessing your turned on Variable Naming (under Recode) on the questions you are having an issue with, then changed the scale after you did that. “Click to write answer 4” is probably one of the “Strongly...” answers. If that’s the case, the good news is you just need to edit your Variable Names and republish and all your data will be fixed.
+1@TomG, many thanks, you are exactly right about the Recode (I’m baffled how that happened, but that’s another problem). And republishing the survey fixes the data within Qualtrics. But then when we export them to .csv, the old responses are found in the .csv file. Is there some kind of refresh I have to do to get them to Export?
+1+1Alas, I spoke too soon. Two days later, the survey has reverted to spitting out the same incorrect data on Export. I’m going to raise this with Support
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