Implementing a daily diary study in qualtrics | XM Community
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Hey everyone,



I am currently setting up a daily diary study in qualtrics. On the first day, the participants should receive the background survey (one block) en the daily diary survey (another block) immediately after it. The next 13 days, participants should receive the daily diary survey every day. I have already made a contact list with participant's email addresses, but I will distribute an anonymous link of the survey via text message (the email address is for verification). I don't know this is the right way to do it? But I don't want to email the survey to the respondents. So my actual question is, does anyone know how I can link the responses of the participants to each other everyday? I already tried something with embedded data and branches, but I am not sure I am doing this the correct way.



Thank you!
Hi @SarahDV, there are a few options, so it really depends on your preferences and some of the details of what you're trying to do. A few thoughts...



1. Could you send a unique link to each respondent via text? Those can be exported from Qualtrics, so you can pass the respondent info through.

2. Similarly, you could add embedded data to your generic link that would pass through. (For example, surveylink.com/FirstName=John&LastName=Doe

3. You could add a required question where the respondent enters their name or email.

Hi SarahDV were you able to figure out how to do this? We are trying to something very similar and struggling some.


Hey Mstokes, yeah I figured out a way to do it. In the background survey on the first day, I made the participants fill in their initials and an email address in an additional question (I removed these answers at the end of the study in order to ensure anonymity). Then I made a contact list of all those participants with their email address and initials as triggers. Afterwards, I designed my daily survey and started with the question 'what is your email address', so their email address functioned as a password to enter the survey and only the participants who filled in their email address the first day could enter the survey. You can do this by adding an authenticator at the start of the survey (find this in survey flow). Now every time a participant fills in the daily survey, you will see which answers belong to which email address so you can easily connect the data afterwards. I also asked them which day it was at the beginning of the survey, it will make it easier for you to order your data.


Thank you so much for this response. This is very helpful. My only other question is how you distributed the survey? Did you send an automated link via email for 13 days?


I collected the phone numbers of my participants so I could send them a reminder and a link via text message every day. An email was also an other option, but since my participants were all adolescents I figured they wouldn't check their mails every day 🙂


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