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i am doing a longitudinal study that has three surveys at three time points. Is there anyway that Qualtrics can generate an anonymous code for each participant and this code stays the same for the same person in all three surveys so that i can match up their answers.
Hello @Angel12345 ,



If your distribution is email distribution in all the three survey, then you can assign an unique embedded ID in the mailing list and create same embedded ID in all the three survey. Now we are able to get a unique code for each person and which will also be same in three surveys.
thank you for the reply, Shashi. So i will need to create an ID for each email address through 'email trigger' and just select 'embedded data is equal to e.g. 001'?
sorry, should be select 'embedded data' then type in the recipient email then select 'is equal to' and type in an ID?
@Angel12345 this is probably easier to do in Excel before you import the contact list into Qualtrics. In Excel you can

1. name a column Unique ID

2. use the formula =rand() to generate a random number and fill down

3. Copy and paste that column as values

4. Double check you don't have duplicates by setting conditional formatting to highlight repeats on the new column

5. Regenerate random numbers until you have no duplicates



If "random" isn't important, at my old firm we would just assign a sequential numerical value to each record that served as their Unique ID.



Import the file to your contacts after you finalize the variable. Then you can use this as your tracker (set an embedded data in survey flow of each project to Unique ID to make sure it is pulled into our data). Also make sure you are distributing all the surveys through email using the same contact list.

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