Hi folks

We're a small positive psychology business and we're wondering if we can use LimeSurvey to serve personality surveys to our clients?

The main requirements would be;
* custom scoring algorithm
* custom report delivered to each user
* login control via shared, expiring links

We think that login control via shared expiring links is the hard part and wonder if LimeSurvey can do it. Here's what we're trying to do:

A client - say a head teacher at a school - attends one of our positive psychology courses, during which they complete a paper-based personality questionnaire which provides insights about what motivates them at work.

Inspired (hopefully by the process, they then wish to go back to the school and have staff in their team take the questionnaire.

We want to provide this service as an online questionnaire by supplying them with a unique url that allows 15 people (custom number for each client, eg 50) to take the questionnaire, and print out the result. The url then expires. This process would make it very easy to give different clients access to the surveys but without the clunkiness of login authentication and without having a url that could escape into the wild over time.

To generate each url, we would collect 5 or 6 custom fields of data, including one field which would apply a weighting to the scoring algorithm. The scoring algorithm is simple - addition of paired questions - with the weighting used to break ties.

We would collect anonymised (no names) data from all the questionnaires in order to validate our process.

Each person who sits a questionnaire sees the individual results of their survey as a custom report.

Thanks very much for reading and we really appreciate your advice on which editions of LimeSurvey we could do this with!

1: included in core
2: Can be sent via HTML or exiting plugin : gitlab.com/SondagesPro/ExportAndStats/pdfReport
3: not out of the box. And here : seems to be an Ad hoc feature : need development.

DenisChenu wrote: 3: not out of the box. And here : seems to be an Ad hoc feature : need development.

What is 3? Shared, expiring links?
A "Valid until" is possible for token.

1 custom scoring algorithm
2 custom report delivered to each user
3 login control via shared, expiring links

shared/expiring

unique url that allows 15 people (custom number for each client, eg 50) to take the questionnaire, and print out the result. The url then expires. This process would make it very easy to give different clients access to the surveys but without the clunkiness of login authentication and without having a url that could escape into the wild over time.

To generate each url, we would collect 5 or 6 custom fields of data, including one field which would apply a weighting to the scoring algorithm. The scoring algorithm is simple - addition of paired questions - with the weighting used to break ties.

Seems more complex than "share a token between different people"

But you are right on the point :
- We can share token
- We can use token attribute in survey
- We can have 15 use piossible for each token (for example)

DenisChenu wrote: Seems more complex than "share a token between different people"

Correct, but we can recommend to check LimeSurvey. It depends on the details if LimeSurvey will be good enough for the case.

To me it sounds exaclty like the use of token with:
Expiration date
Uses left

You could add a new participant (e.g. school XY), upload the 5-6 custom fields (I assume they are custom per client/school, not per participant) and give the respective "uses left" and set an expiry date.

Then this exact link can be used as many times that you have given them "uses left" and it will expire after a certain time.

Let's assume the school XY wants the possibility to fill in the form for 50 teachers, you can apply "uses left = 50" to the link, set all the attributes and then send them the link. When the survey was completed 50 times, it automatically shuts down. No login necessary. Only problem that I see: The principal/school will not know how many have completed and how many uses are left (you can see this in the participant table).

But I think it is a very simple and easy approach to what you are trying to do.

Denis, Holch, Jelo thanks very much for the replies, sounds like LimeSurvey is for us! The token implementation will make providing client access so much easier.

Just to check, one of the custom fields per clients is a series of weightings of personality traits that affect the scoring of the questionnaire - can that custom field collected on setting up a client affect the scoring algorithm?

The weightings for lawyers, for instance, are different for the weightings for head teachers. We'd be aiming to create four or five different set of these weighting schemes and re-use them repeatedly for different clients.

custom fields per clients is a series of weightings of personality traits

I would create a custom attribute for every figure separately. So if you have 4 different weights, you also should have 4 different custom attributes. Then you just use expression manager and equation type questions to calculate the scores, maybe you might also want to use the assessment feature to be able to attribute different values to different answers and not make 100% of this in equations.

Thinking on from this, it is extremely difficult to really do a full scoring within the EM editor, it would be much easier to somehow throw all the data over the fence to some other database, and then have an R Scoring script run on it, and then publish the results somewhere.

While not wanting to create a user management, it would be good to create a kind of artificial user name and a password token at the start or the end of the data entry process, e.g. two random numbers one to function as User and the other one as password, which the data provider would then be able to use to access his profile, albeit at a later stage and not immediately.

I am also thinking of a positive psychology test, with a variation, and hence also want to make sure it is safe, but also completely anonymous, so I don't want any emails in my database.

What do you think ?