Hello,
I am planning a non-commercial longitudinal online survey as part of my doctoral research, with two survey waves. Recruitment will take place via a public link or QR code. I expect approximately 2,000 participants overall, and the data collection period is planned to last around 18 months.
For the second survey wave, I would like to use SoSci Survey’s participant management. Participants should be able to voluntarily provide an email address, which would be stored separately from the survey data. SoSci Survey would assign an internal participant identifier that could be used to link wave 1 and wave 2 and to send invitations or reminder emails for wave 2. As the study lead, I would not want to have access to the link between the email address and the survey responses.
The key question for us is whether this specific setup is permitted on the free academic server at www.soscisurvey.de.
As we understand it, there would still technically be a pseudonymous link because SoSci Survey can associate the internal participant identifier with the email address on the server, even though this link would not be visible to the study team. At the same time, no names or email addresses would be stored in the actual survey dataset.
Our specific question is therefore:
Would a longitudinal survey with a voluntary email address, an internal SoSci participant identifier, and no access for the study team to the link between email address and survey data be permitted on the free academic server? Or would the survey data in this setup still be considered personal or pseudonymised data, meaning that the Pro server at s2survey.net would be required?
If the free server is suitable, it would also be helpful to know whether the internal participant identifier is sufficient to reliably link wave 1 and wave 2 without additionally collecting a self-generated study code.
Thank you very much for your guidance.
Kind regards,
Susanne Schulz-Ille
Doctoral researcher, HAW Hamburg