Hi everyone,

Sorry if this has been asked before - all my respondents will be required to provide informed consent via a tick-box, but I would like that participants can download this for their own records.

For example, when a respondent reaches the final 'thank you' page of a survey, can they download a copy of their own responses before closing?

Thanks for your help!
GM

Sorry if this has been asked before - all my respondents will be required to provide informed consent via a tick-box, but I would like that participants can download this for their own records.

There is currently no feature implemented in LS3,4 or 5 to directly offer that. You can send answers via E-Mail (use notification email form). You can find threads about that here in the forum.
But a download feature (e.g. to comply with GDPR) of the complete response-record is not available. Thirdparty plugins might offer that, but I'm aware of one at the moment.
 

would like that participants can download this for their own records.

What means "download"? As Excel, *.csv, *.sql or just a printout?
Well, there is the feature to download the two pdf reports with their results.
"Presentation / Participants may print answers:  ON"

But I do not recommend them at the moment. The layout has to be improved a lot

And you may create your own downloadable report of the responses with the plugin pdfReport.

Joffm
 

But a download feature (e.g. to comply with GDPR)

I am not aware of any rule of GDPR that requires the possibility of downloading answers given in a questionnaire. Do you have any more detailed information abou that?

I am not aware of any rule of GDPR that requires the possibility of downloading answers given in a questionnaire. Do you have any more detailed information abou that?

If I fill out a questionnaire with personal data, I have the right to get a complete copy of that data.

Art. 15 GDPR Right of access by the data subject

The format has to be structured and easily readable.
 Art. 20 GDPR Right to data portability

There are survey tools which already offer that functionality. That is not that easy to implement, because you need to offer the data at request.
So you need routines to identify all records of a person in all surveys.

Which is also needed to comply with the following articles.
Art. 16 GDPR Right to rectification
Art. 17 GDPR Right to erasure (‘right to be forgotten’)

You can do that all manually. And respondents are not rushing to ask for the data they just have submitted, but they have the right to do so.

OK, I am of course aware of these aspects of GDPR.

Your post sounded a little bit like it is a requirement of GDPR that respondents can access the data that they gave to a survey immediately after the survey.

While it would be great to have this automated, I think for most cases doing this manually is probably not a big deal for a couple of reasons:

- Most respondents are fully aware of the data they are providing to a survey
- This information might often not even contain personal data
- Personal data might be disconnected from survey data (well, not in Limesurvey, hahahaha, only if you do it manually)
- The data might actually not remain on the survey server, but will be downloaded for analysis purposes and later deleted from the survey server
- As you said, respondents to a survey usually are not that interested in the data they just provided voluntarily. And in my experience of a couple of years of research, no one has ever requested their data to be deleted or wanted to see what data has been stored, in any country I have done research in. This might change with people being more and more aware of rights through GDPR, but as market researchers we generally have given this right to respondents before already. At least the ethical ones.
- In general respondents that gave their responses freely and voluntarily have very little interest in getting this data. There might be very specific projects where this might be a little bit more delicate of course and the share of respondents who would like to have access to this information might be higher.

So I am not saying, that there might not be cases where people will make use of their right, but for most of us, these cases are probably very rare and a manual process should be easy. In many cases there might not be much to provide anyway, if you separate personal data from survey data and delete personal data in a reasonable time.

Now for panels or big institutes with a huge survey turnaround, an automatic approach might be interesting because the costs of implementing this might be lower than the costs of manual proceedures over time. But I guess they'll spend some money on a different solution anyway.

@GBMIMM: By the way, this is a general discussion and not related directly to your request. Your requirements might have good reasons. I was just asking Jelo if there is something in the GDPR that I am not aware of. But seems like we are on the same page there.

In my case, I think it would be nice to have a .pdf.

I didn't know about the "Presentation / Participants may print answers: ON" function. Even though the layout may not be great right now, I think it will work well enough in this context. Thanks for your help!

Hi all, thanks for all the comments. 

Yes in this case, it is a GDPR matter concerning the participant's right to access their own data. In the vast majority of cases, this does never seem to crop up and participants rarely ever contact researchers after the fact. However, it is simply a stipulation of the ethics requirement for this study, so it must be done! In our case, we are trying to avoid collecting any personal info (including email addresses) from respondants, and for the sake of simplicity we don't want them to have to sign up as LS users.

It appears as though the 'Participants can print answers / ON' function is my solution for now, but it would be great to see more options for self-exporting data as a respondant in future. Thanks again!

If you are not collecting any personal data then it will be basically impossible for the respondents to download their responses once they closed the window of the survey.

So coming back and asking for the data stored about them will be impossible, because you don't know who the answers are from.

So I only see the printing option as possible.