I have created a questionnaire on Qulatrics and I want my participants to access the survey only using a unique access code that will be provided in the invitation letter. I generated the codes in Excel but I'm completely oblivious about how to connect codes to my survey. Any thoughts on this?
The easiest solution is to add an additional (write-in) question at the end of the survey, instructing participants to type in the code they previously received in the blank.
I am interested in Blaine's recommendation to include this write-in item at the end of the survey--do you suggest this to avoid the influence of social desirability (i.e., the respondent's awareness of the researcher's ability to connect the unique code to his/her responses impacting the respondent's answers to survey questions asked after the write-in question)? This seems ok if Sura is not interested in using any partial response data. But, if partial responses are also of interest, placing this write-in item at the end of the survey would prevent the researcher from connecting the unique invitation code to the correct participant's response because the respondent would not have an opportunity to answer the write-in item. So, item order may matter and should receive careful consideration.
~Sarah
Sarah D. Newton I suggest including the write-in answer asking for the code at the end of the survey to incentivize participants to complete the entire survey. Presumably, participants are receiving some form of compensation for participating, and you may have the occasional lazy participant who simply enters their invitation code (to receive compensation) while not completing the remainder of the survey. This is a potential issue regardless of the method used to link surveys to participant identifiers.
If you are interested in partial responses, you can include the identifier item at the beginning and enable the 'force response' option in Qualtrics for the item. Bear in mind, however, the issues discussed above. Personally, I enable the 'force response' for all items to help reduce the number of incomplete surveys.
Blaine Tomkins --that makes sense. I was not assuming any sort of incentive structure, as those resources are not always available for researchers (depending on the project). Also, the Force Response option is useful if participants try to skip items throughout the survey--I use it myself to ensure responses to certain non-negotiable items. However, I think invoking this option would be less useful for those who only finish a portion of the survey--this is the scenario in which I thought having the unique code write-in item at the end of the application could be problematic (if respondents do not answer enough questions to get to the unique code item).
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