Hi everyone,
I've experienced this strange behavior now on a few of my surveys. I'm running behavioral, cognitive psychology experiments so ideally I'd like a given participant to only respond once. I do have "Prevent Ballot Box Stuffing" checked in Survey Options. However, I sometimes get multiple partial responses which are obviously from the same person. This has happened a number of times now, so it's not just one participant's weird internet glitch. It's always the same pattern: there's a partial response from X-Y o'clock. Then there's another partial response from Y-Z o'clock (meaning, the 2nd response starts the same minute that the 1st response was last recorded). The 2nd response is only partial as well. Then there's a 3rd response from Z-A o'clock (starting the same minute that the 2nd response was last recorded). They come in groups of 3-5 responses like this; sometimes the final one is completed, sometimes not. I can't figure out what's going on; why would a subject do part of the survey, exit, start from the beginning, do part of the survey, exit, start from the beginning again, etc?
Has anyone else seen this or have any ideas as to what's going on? Is there some explanation within Qualtrics? Is it really possible that multiple subjects decide to exit mid-survey and immediately start again from the beginning, multiple times?
I'm attaching a picture of an example (with the actual IP addresses blocked).
My guess is you don't have Save & Continue checked in survey options. This allows people to pick up where they left off. Without it, if someone refreshes the web page the survey will start over, which may be happening on your survey.
Hi TomG , your guess is correct that I don't have "Save & Continue" checked. However, that was a deliberate choice - I want participants to complete the entire survey in one sitting. I hadn't expected that people would refresh the page mid-survey, so I don't know what's up with that. I guess I could address this by checking S&C and just implementing a time cutoff to exclude too-long responses.
But I don't understand, with "Save & Continue" off and "Prevent Ballot Box Stuffing" on, why does refreshing the page bring them back to the beginning of the survey? Why doesn't it display the "you've already completed this survey" message?
Thanks for your response!
https://www.qualtrics.com/community/discussion/comment/30870#Comment_30870Without Save & Continue, refresh takes them to the survey url as if they are a new respondent. They don't get "you've already completed this survey" because they never completed.
Ahh - I thought Prevent Ballot Box Stuffing prevented someone from starting a survey more than once, but it sounds like it actually prevents someone from finishing a survey more than once (or, to be more precise, starting a survey after they've already finished that survey).
Thanks - I'll turn on S&C and implement a time cutoff and it sounds like that will solve my problem!
Leave a Reply
Enter your E-mail address. We'll send you an e-mail with instructions to reset your password.