I have recently set-up a survey. It needed to be anonymous but I also needed to follow-up with the participants at two follow-up surveys that are similiar but I was hoping on these to be shorter.

I thought from reading stevebennett.me/2013/01/21/anonymous-lon...eys-with-limesurvey/ that there will be some way for me to link the responses between one person between surveys but after going back I am now really confused. It didn't mention anything about attribute fields at the start of the procedure so I thought I was okay.

There doesn't seem to be any relation to the token list in my current survey and the response set because I didn't add attribute fields in my original survey. As a result I don't see how in the follow-up survey I'll be able to make the link between the token, their new response set and their old response set.

Am I screwed?

Anoymous means anonymous means there is no way to know who respondet which survey.

You can't do really anonymous surveys if you need to connect the data later, because somehow you will need to connect both, so the respondent needs to be somehow identifiable.

So I guess, the answer is yes, you are screwed.

Just checking - There are questions which help in identification (such as age, gender, citizenship) but because I haven't set the attribution field before switching the survey to online, is no way for them to be linked now?

On the website you are linking a specific approach is explained on how to manage a survey to be somehow anonymous without using the anonymous mode of Limesurvey. So if you followed the instructions there, you might be fine.

If you have set the survey to anonymous on Limesurvey, then you are screwed...

In the tutorial it specifically mentions that you do not set the survey to anonymous on Limesurvey. The anonymity is achieved by the use of the an anonymous email service:

Participants must not sign up for the survey using their actual email address. Instead, they should go to a third-party email forwarding site like notsharingmy.info . For the participant:

If you explain a little bit what you did and how your set up and invitation process was, maybe we can see if there is something that can be done. But I have very little hope.

Which attribution field are you referring to?

I think I have made a mistake

I just setup the tokens so that participants could register to complete my survey but that was it.

The attribution field I am referring to is the step 3 in the instructions on the previous URL I linked.

Edit:

I think I will be okay as I have enough identifying features that I should be able to just ask participants again to provide those details... it's a shame there I screwed it up so there is no easier way.

But step 3 is only referring to the follow up surveys and you haven't started those yet.

This step basically means that you take responses from the first survey to pass them on to the second survey through the token table (custom attributes), so you can connect the two surveys and you can pipe into the second survey some answers from the first survey, all connected to the anonymous email address. If you don't have the connection of the results of the first survey to this anonymous email address (because the survey was set to anonymous), then I see little chance to connect the two surveys or pass on answers from the previous survey to the new survey. It just a technical thing.

Thank you

I should have read the guide more carefully. I just hope that participants will be willing to respond to a similar number of questions again.