Is there any way to store participants email in my survey while being anonymous? | XM Community
Skip to main content
Question

Is there any way to store participants email in my survey while being anonymous?

  • November 27, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 377 views
D

Hey everyone,
Is there any way that I can obtain participants' information in my survey but somehow making the information inaccessible to everyone except for the website itself. The goal of this is to remind and distribute the follow-up survey link to participants two weeks later without me having any idea who the recipient is. Also, can I restrict their accessibility to the follow-up study only after two weeks have passed? I linked my two surveys already and by entering their ID, qualtrics can decide if the last response was two weeks ago or not. If it's not, they won't be granted access and they must return some other day (essentially after two-weeks)

Best regards,
Edgar

    1 reply

    A
    Level 7 ●●●●●●●
    Forum|alt.badge.img+22
    • ahmedA
    • Level 7 ●●●●●●●
    • December 1, 2020

    You can try and run a web service to post the email ids to a private server, this way you will have a list of people who have completed your survey, but not connected to their responses.
    Since, I still haven't come across a proper solution to remove identifiable information from the survey, I use a complicated process. It may help:

    1. Create an embedded variable: 
      eml-asked

    2. Set its value as 
      "false"
      .

    3. Create a Question Block that asks for an individual's email id. Lets call it 
      eml-block
      . (It can be a question, but we need a page break somewhere, so block is better)

    4. Add JS similar to the one below. It tracks if the question has been displayed earlier or not. And hides the question along with removing the email id, if it is displayed more than once.

    5. Place
       eml-block
      in the survey flow

    6. Add the webservice to store their email ids (I use a GitHub private repo)

    7. Add 
      eml-block
      in the survey flow again

    Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.addOnload(function()
    {
        var x = "${e://Field/eml-asked}";
        if(x=="true"){  
            //Change the query selector based on your question
            document.querySelector("#QR\\\\~"+this.questionId).value="eml@removed.auto";
            this.getQuestionContainer().hide();
            this.clickNextButton();
        }
        Qualtrics.SurveyEngine.setEmbeddedData("eml-asked", "true");


    });
    Here's why it works. When the same question block is used more than once in a survey, Qualtrics only stores the last value of the answer. Here, the email id is captured once, then stored somewhere else. The second time the question is in the block, the email id has been removed and hence that value is stored in the answers.

    Terms & ConditionsAccessibility statement