Collecting email addresses without any link to responses to keep anonymity

Question

Hi,I am using an external service for getting research participants and the platform requires me to collect email addresses as a way of proving survey completion for compensation purposes on their end. Is there a way I can collect the emails without me being able to link them to people's responses? I am using an anonymous link for survey distribution and I cannot assign randomized IDs because of some limitations with the external service. I also don't want to ask for the email addresses within the survey.

ahmedA · Answer

I recently came across a survey on, where at the end, they had asked me if I wanted to enter my email id for a raffle. Clicking on that link, took me to another survey, where entering my email id was the only question. So that's one approach.
You could also take advantage of the Qualtrics feature/bug, where if you use the same question more than once in a survey, only the last response is recorded. So here's how I would go about it:

Create a block with just one question, "What is your email id"

Display this block the first time and capture the email id.

Fire off a webservice after this to store the email id at some other location (Github, Google Docs etc.)

Add the block in the survey flow for the second time, and use the JS given below to hide it and capture a random value.

Now you'll have the list of email ids in the remote location, but only "random value" in your survey results.

Of course, it is technically still possible to match the email ids to the responses, based on the time and sequence, but this'll make it difficult.
Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function () {
    this.getQuestionContainer().hide();
    qid = this.questionId;
    document.querySelector("#QR\\\\~"+qid).value="random value";
    this.clickNextButton();
});

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