How to generate respondent ID to ask for a later survey

Hello everyone.

I’m writing here to ask about a possibility I was thinking of about my questionnaire in SurveyEngine.

If I ever want to do the questionnaire I have deployed now later in the future, to test whether the preferences of my respondents have changed, what do you think I could do?

Say that I have delivered the questionnaire to university students. In a year time, I will deliver the same questionnaire to the same pool of students, and hopefully “catch” at least some of the students I am interviewing now, so that I can see whether their answers to my experiment evolve over time.

In order to do this and keep the questionnaire anonymous at the same time, I was thinking of using a code that people can enter when retaking the questionnaire. I would need a way to randomly generate this code and let them write it down or something like that.

Is there any possible way to do this in SurveyEngine?

Or is there another better way to do this while keeping the questionnaire anonymous?

Any help is deeply appreciated.
Thanks in advance!
Luca

I am not sure what the chances are that students write down some identifier and find it again after a year :-/. However, the questionnaire being anonymous probably implies that you cannot keep track of the identifiers, so you probably have to rely on the participants keeping them in one way or the other.

Generating a random code in SurveyEngine is certainly possible. You would use a derived value for that. The screenshot shows an example. The example combines a random number with the internal respondent ID into an 8 digit hexadecimal code. Of course, this is only a simple example. The code is guaranteed to be unique for the first 65536 sessions, but people could guess how many respondents have participated before them, which you might not want. Other options are conceivable depending on requirements and desired length of the code.


The text box then shows the code to the respondent (note that you have to switch the text box to code view before entering HTML code). Fancier options are conceivable like building a link to the survey itself with the user code as external ID, which the respondent could bookmark for next year, or show a QR code that the respondent could save etc.

Thank you mate! That was really what I was looking for. I’ll try it out, thanks!