I need to implement an employee survey, but I have encountered a problem, and I can’t think of a satisfying solution.

The scenario
My employer wants to be able to view the result of the employee survey based on organizational affiliation. There a three levels in the organization: L1, L2 and L3.

In order to view the result based on organization affiliation I need to record that information one way or the other.

I’ve identified two solutions:

User input
The user selects his or hers organizational affiliation.

There are however three problems with this solution:

• all users know L3, most users knows L2 but some users might not know L1.
• some users could by mistake select the wrong organizational unit
• some users could select the wrong organizational unit knowingly

System input
When the users are registrered in the LS database, their organizational affiliation is also registrered. This information is then gathered as a hidden question by the system.

This does however result in a serious problem, the users can’t be anonymous when information is automatically gathered from the database. (To me, this seems like an unnecessary limitation in LimeSurvey)

My question
Is there some elegant way that I can gather organizational information in the background and still allow the respondents to be anonymous?

If there are no relatively simple solutions, I have access to programmers that could help, if you can think of a more advanced solution.

If we are able to solve this problem my organization will continue to use LimeService as our service provider, but if we can’t solve this problem there’s a major chance that my organization will look for other solutions, and I wouldn’t want that since I love LimeSurvey.

All ideas and suggestions are highly appreciated!

Your three problems are the reasons for choosing the second option.

One alternative would be using a three surveys - identical, but you distribute the links among different levels - in that way respondents remain anonymous. You can also use actually one survey and add some url parametes that differentiate the respondents on each level eg yoursrver.com/surveyurl/index.php?level=L1 or somethin less obvious Look here - www.limesurvey.org/manual/URL_fields

I've only gotten URL parameters to work when the respondents aren't anonymous, and I want them to be anonymous.

There are three levels, but L1 has ten departments, L2 has 30 departments and L3 has 200 departments.

This survey needs to be as anonymous as possible because there are very delicate and personal questions. If our account was hacked and the result made publicly available anyone would be able to see what a specific employee answered, and that would be very bad.