In an anonymous survey administered via Tokens, the manual says, "If the survey is anonymous, then no link (technically: foreign key relationship) is available between the tokens table and the responses."

If an Ethics Committee wanted to allow subjects in such an anonymous survey to be able to stop participating, and therefore withdraw their data as anonymously as they submitted it, this is currently impossible in LimeSurvey (as I currently understand it).

However, as Ethics Committees get more and more worried about anonymity, it might be worth revisiting this.

Perhaps if anonymous completion of a survey were to generate a new, separate, one-time token in a URI, a user could be invited to copy and keep the URI in case they ever decided to withdraw their participation. The URI would activate an otherwise inaccessible page where the token would be recognised and the data deleted (or marked unusable). It would then appear to the admin as if the holder of the original token had simply never completed the survey.

Or something like...

Has the situation changed with this? Is it possible yet?

Thanks

This just doesn't make sense. If you want to guarantee 100% anonymity, there should be technically no way to be able to connect a person with their response.

Any option to "anonymously" withdraw from the survey would contradict that. Because somehow, someone would need to be able to connect the person with the results again. Thus: Not 100% anonymous.

So it is either one or the other. Even the Token would open a certain risk of being able to connect a person with its results, which the ethic commission should be very worried about.

Just out of curiosity: Why would someone want/need to withdraw a response they actively submitted in the first place, if the response is 100% anonymous?

I am currently trying to get ethical approval for a survey as part of a MSc and one of the requirements is that participants must be able to withdraw their consent/participation at any time (up until the point of data analysis) but participants must not be identifiable. I am new to LimeSurvey as my university has changed which online survey platforms are approved so I'm trying to figure out how to meet the ethics committee requirements.

I am not sure how other tools should be able to provide what the ethics committee invented. To me that looks technically impossible. But then, maybe someone has a solution that guarantees to identify the answers of someone that has answered anonymously.... wait...

<troll>
Ethics Committees without solid scientific or technical skills will just take non sense decisions.
Not being good at math should not be considerate as a requirement to study philosophy and ethic.
</troll>

sjm223 wrote: I am new to LimeSurvey as my university has changed which online survey platforms are approved so I'm trying to figure out how to meet the ethics committee requirements.

What online survey platforms are approved and why?

I wonder how survey systems will handle GDPR.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Data_Prote...ion#Data_portability
Especially when you think about the "Right of access", "Right to erasure" and the "Data portability".
The type of webservices they had in mind, were social networks.
But the right of "data portability" isn't restricted to them. So it applies to the limesurveyforum as well. I want all my posts in a export file, please Or to a surveysystem.

LimeSurvey could generate an hashcode at the end of a completed survey, which is only shown to the respondent on screen or as download file. The hashcode is written in the results.
The token of the invitations will still be not written into the results.

The other typical situation, where committees want separation, is when e.g a lottery is in place.
The anonymous token concept on the other end of the survey.
You want separate data tables, but you don't want a linked survey (cause that can be tricked by people to get the prizes without answering the survey).
Some survey tools offer to capture personal details after the survey and place them in a separate data table.
www.soscisurvey.de/help/doku.php/en:create:questions:contact

When LimeSurvey starts to become a sophisticated user permission system, demands for these kind of data separation things will popup more often.

Well, we are making jokes, but it is a serious problem. Those ethics committees spend hours and hours to prepare rules to be followed. And I think they do an important job. However, unfortunately the technical background is often lacking and unfortunately there are many people out there who have difficulties to make the right conclusions. Which leads to things like that.

How do you want to technically assure that someone has access to their own results, when you request to make it impossible to connect a respondent with their results.

The above mentioned token is a possible solution. However, once you open this box you have a backdoor. And backdoors can and will be used. So this is a real dilemma.

Personally I think that if it is explicit in the survey information that once a response is submitted (perhaps include a 'submit' option at the end) that it cannot be withdrawn nor can it be traced back to the participant there is not much else we can do if we wish our participants to be anonymous. This is what I am going to argue with the ethics committee.

Thanks for all the help today

I never use this function, but the option save and resume should allow something like that.

This might be something you want to look at.
www.limesurvey.org/manual/Data_management

--> Participant may save and resume later:

I don't know how it works in the backend and what is stored about the respondent and where, but it says it can be used in case of anonymous surveys.

But I am sure there must be some connection established between respondent and results as well.

holch wrote: --> Participant may save and resume later:

That wording in the manual might be a bit misleading.

This function is (not checked with the newer LS) only available till you complete the survey.




Might be worth a feature request to recode the save and resume to be available after submission.
And to have a option to define, what kind of id is used, to be able to edit responses.

E.g. like SurveyMonkey: help.surveymonkey.com/articles/en_US/kb/...vey-response#Options

This function is (not checked with the newer LS) only available till you complete the survey.

Which makes total sense. You can't really "resume" a completed survey.