Hi,

I will be distributing surveys at three time points. How do I link each respondents survey without using their email addresses and/or names (it has to be kept anonymous)? The survey will be open to anyone.

Also, I will use a different survey at time 2 and 3, but I still want to link the responses with survey 1. Is this possible?

Thank you.

Cath

I don't see any way to do that while preserving complete anonymity. You will need to assign some sort of unique identifier (like an ID) to link the response sets.

I agree with Tpartner. If you want to send out the surveys in different points of time, I don't see a chance to do this in complete anonymity on a technology level.

You will need to have an identifier that is the same for all 3 surveys and you need to send this via email. So there will always be the possibility to connect them to personal data (probably email address). But, you can still guarantee that you analyze the data anonymously, you just deconnect the personal data from the identifier during analysis.

This should be OK for about 95% of all cases, in some cases this level of anonymity might not be enough.

You could think about creating a unique code and show it at the end of the survey to the respondent and ask them to store it and put it into the next survey. But usually people don't remember this code and don't find it anymore, when they need it. So probably not a good idea either.

If you have the capability, create a registration page that generates a random key for that individual and creates a link to your survey with the key. For example mysite.com/limesurvey/3333333/index.php/?key=123887FDIFUS993

Note: They will need to keep their key unless your registration page includes some way for them to store that information.

Pass this key as a parameter to your survey and store the key. The key is passed via Settings->Panel Integration setup section and mapped to a question in your survey (you don't have to show the key during the survey, just have an item to store the data).

For subsequent uses, they need to supply their key for you to generate a link.

The biggest flaw in this thinking is expecting the user to keep their key, but perhaps you know your user-base well enough to manage that.