Dear LimeSurvey community,

I want my students to answer three surveys at different times and match their respective responses in the end. I.e. I want
to match the three resulting data sets on an indvidual level so that I have all answers of respondet A in one row, all answers of respondent B in one row and so on.

Many thanks fpr your help in advance.
Kind regards,
Katko

You will need to have one identifier (e.g. the same token for the same respondent in all 3 surveys) and later match the result files via this identifier in the analysis tool of your choice (Excel, SPSS, etc.).

Many thanks for your reply.

I have been trying to find out how to create a respondents' identifier. It took me some time and now I have the following idea:

1) "survey menu: survey participants" --> button "create" --> add participants

2) "manage attributes" --> create the attribute "identifier" and assign an ID to each resondent manually

Is this how you meant to create an identifier?

A question still remains: How can I export the attribute "identifier" as a variable to my three datasets that I want to merge using the identifier?

The correct word is token based surveys. Create a closed survey with tokens. These tokens are your identifiers. You just need to make sure to create the same token for all 3 surveys, but this is easy to do. You do not need to create your participants manually one by one. You can create a list of participants in any spreadsheet and export it to CSV.

The best way to do it is to create one respondent manually, then export the token table. This way you have a template and you see how it needs to be formated.

Then you fill your token table with the data like name, email, etc. You can either create your own tokens or let Limesurvey create the token for you when uploading. It is important to use the same token table for all 3 surveys, so that each participant has the same token over the 3 surveys.

You can export the token table together with the results later on, given that the survey is not marked as anonymous. If the survey is marked anonymous, by default you can not connect the participant data with the results data, which makes total sense.

Here the link in the manual: www.limesurvey.org/manual/survey_participants

Thank you so much! This really, really helps!!!