Multi-level structure data anonymity?

Question

Hey, we've been struggling with multi-level structure data anonymity lately, and I would be very grateful if you could help me.

Let's say I want to design a multi-level survey the following way:

• I ask the participant for text inputs like "Who are your best friends?"
• Using the multi-level structure, I then ask the participant something like "What is %friendname%'s favourite ice cream flavour?" for each provided name

However, we don't want said %friendname% then to be saved to the final dataset due to privacy concerns.
Is there a way to do this without having the server save that variable to the dataset?

Please let me know if it would be helpful to provide more info. I hope I haven't overlooked someone else asking the same question :/

Answer 1

Hmm ... the name will at least be stored for a while.

You would probably ask the respondents to only give the first names, so that it's unlikely to identify the person.

The names itself can be deleted from the datasets (both, the main and the sub questionnaire's) via dropValue(). You can even do that immediately after copying the value to a PHP variable and use registerVariable() on that. While this would prevent the names from appearing in the dataset, they are still saved in the background until the case is finished (FINISHED=1).

So, no 100% perfect solution, but unless the names are confidential, the 80% solution shall do. It's actually not a technical limitation, but simply a matter of program logic to store the name somewhere until it was shown in the question.

Comments

Thanks a lot! Just like you said, I managed to implement the solution just with [registerVariable ()] and [dropValue ()], which I should have been able to find out by myself, so sorry for what may have been a dumb question and thanks again for the help.