What happens to my data when I edit an active survey

Question

Hi!one of our user edited a survey which was active by replacing an answer choice by another into a single answer type of question. When looking at a respondent answers who chose the initial answer choice in the Data&Analysis Tab, the questions looks as not responded. But when extracting the data in Excel, there is an answer which is the new choice. I'm wondering if that is possible; I thought the responses would just be marked as unvalid.Did you experience this already?Thanks !

lizb311 · Accepted Answer

The behavior when you edit a live survey depends on how exactly you edit it. If you edit an existing response in a live survey, it should change how that response is coded for anyone who selected it previously... So for example, if I have the following response choices in my question:ApplesBananasChocolatesIf I edit "Apples" to "Apples are my favorite," after responses have been collected, then anyone who previously selected "Apples" will now be reported as "Apples are my favorite." This is mostly useful for when you need to make minor edits to spelling or punctuation - editing a response does not invalidate previous responses, it simply updates them. BUT you will run into issues if you substantially change a response during editing... Like if you changed "Apples" to "Peanut butter," then everybody who said "Apples" will now look like they said "Peanut butter."If your user completely deleted the response "Apples" and added an entirely new response, then all the data for people who previously selected "Apples" would be gone, and would not be replaced by the new response that was added.Here's a link to Qualtrics' help article on this topic: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/testing-and-editing-an-active-survey/#EditingAnActiveSurvey To my knowledge, the data in the Data & Analysis tab should match the data that gets exported to Excel. I'm not really sure why it wouldn't match there for you.

NDesponds · Answer

lizb311 thank you for your well explained answer!

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