Longitudinal study with initially unknown participants

HI @TalM ,

No, the first survey does not require distribution to an existing contact list. You will collect email addresses (and any other identifying or background information you want) in the first survey, then add that information to a contact list that you will use to distribute the second survey to. You will also need to make sure that your survey ID number (called “Login ID” in the support page example, but you can name it something else if you prefer) exists in survey 1, the contact list, and survey 2, and that the spelling and capitalization is consistent in all three places.

All steps shows under “First Survey Setup” are relevant to your use case.

Under “Second Survey Setup”, the following steps are not relevant unless you need to display information collected in survey 1 to the respondent in survey 2: #2, #14-23.

Hope this helps!

This is very helpful, thank you. This brings up a couple more questions if you might be able to help: 

My second survey doesn’t need to present any data from the first survey to the participant (i.e., it seems as though no first survey ‘embedded data’ needs to be displayed to participants at the second survey). Does this mean that steps #3-14 under “Second Survey Set-up” are still relevant? Are these merely the steps that pull data into the second survey’s data file to be exported in a way which is accurately linked within participants? 

Thank you!

Also, because of the way my survey is designed, there is 3 separate ‘email  questions’ in that participants’ consent process stratification requires that they be asked for their email in different ways. That being said, each participant will only be asked for their email once in 1 question. Does this pose a problem for creating the contact list in that the data will not just come from 1 question? 

Although you’re not displaying any data from the first survey to the respondent, those steps (I should have included up to #15 in my original post) are still important if you want to:

• Authenticate the respondent (Steps 3-13)
• Carry forward the ID number assigned in the first survey into the data file for the second survey so you can link responses (Steps 3-4, 13-15)

Steps 2 and 16-23 are specific to displaying data to respondents so those can be skipped.

So are you saying that each respondent will enter their email address once, but it could be in one of three different email questions? If that’s the case, you might have to create a new Embedded data field at the end of your survey that pulls together the emails entered from all three questions. The branching logic would be something like:

• If Email1 is not blank, then FullEmail=Email1.
• If Email2 is not blank, then FullEmail=Email2.
• If Email3 is not blank, then FullEmail=Email3.

Thank you, do you know if these instructions would work just as well for what I’m trying to do?

https://www.evalacademy.com/articles/how-to-link-surveys-in-qualtrics-with-a-participant-id