Linking responses to respondents

Question

I would like to follow-up a previous survey and I prepared personalised links (Serienmails) using the email addresses provided in the first survey wave. When downloading the data, I receive a "SERIAL", but I cannot link it to the email addresses in any way. It would be the basis of this survey to know which response arrived from which person.

Could please someone help me in solving this?

Answer 1

When downloading the data, I receive a "SERIAL", but I cannot link it to the email addresses in any way.

This is the idea of pseudonymous data.

It would be the basis of this survey to know which response arrived from which person.

We are talking about personal data in that case that would underly the GDPR. Please note that personal data must not be collected on www.soscisurvey.de, only on a local server or on the pro-server s2survey.net

When creating a project on www.soscisurvey.de, SoSci Survey explicitly asks if you intended to collect personal data.

A second survey wave is still no problem, If you send another mailing to the same adresses in the same project (without deleting them in the meantime), the new data recors will have the same SERIAL as in the first wave.

Comments

Thank you. I am aware of the function you describe above. This was the reason why we selected SoSci to collect data in our first wave. However, the questionnaire and the data got automatically archived and the system does not allow me to upload it again. Could you please provide personalised help for this problem?

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> However, the questionnaire and the data got automatically archived and the system does not allow me to upload it again.

Not so good ... but possibly there is an solution IF the project was archived in the recent 30 days: https://support.soscisurvey.de/?qa=1059/restore-data-that-was-deleted-archived

After 30 days, the connection between adresses and SERIALs will be lost without any possibility of restoration. We take data protection serious.

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It was archived on 11th September, but I have all data downloaded in Excel. Is there a way to upload the data to the server and then send the emails to the participants of the first wave of my study? (The system did not download the SERIALs, hence, I do not have them.)

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No, as I wrote, the connection between adresses and serials has been deleted along with the data, and the backups of these database tables have been deleted after 30 days. I am sorry, but there is no way to find out which email address the SERIALs belonged to.

If running multi-wave surveys, it is essential to run all survey waves in the same survey project.

The only option that I can offer is to repeat a couple of questions from the first wave in the second, and match the data records based on these responses. This will not work in every case, but it's some kind of a chance.