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hi, I have a survey that is currently live but it seems that some responses aren’t saving - so participants have completed the survey and received the completion email yet when I go to their responses I only have half of their input. It’s happening sporadically so I don’t think it’s a survey design issue…

does anyone have any ideas as to why this might be happening?

Hi,
did you check if these respondents have something in common?

I should say "There is a design issue".
Therefore you should send the lss export, so we can try to reproduce the issue and may see the reason.

Joffm 

No there’s nothing in common that I can see or work out, and I do believe they have completed as it’s a linked survey so I can see that they have done the second half. It’s weird because it’s 5 people out of 46…

Well, there could always be relevance equations that make them skip certain questions or equations, if done wrongly, can also delete responses, etc.

So without seeing your structure, without knowing what type of respondents these where, which questions (always the same questions?) are not saved, etc. it is really difficult to troubleshoot your issue.

As it is "sporadically" I have my doubts that this is a bug. Not impossible, but without any further details, difficult to narrow down where the issues could lie.

My first guess: in the survey. That is most often also the easiest way to trouble shoot because we can see and test what is going on.

Do you have contact with these respondents? Can you ask them if they remember that they have answered the questions that are missing?

And 5 out of 46 is over 10%, I wouldn't consider this "sporadic". Good to know that they have reached the end page as they have been redirected to the second part of the survey, This excludes a couple of potential error cases.

How is your survey structured? I assume based on what you write, the answers are missing from a certain point onwards to the end of the survey. So it is a whole block missing, not one or the question. Do all cases stop at the same point?

Was the survey thoroughly tested before? Going through every possible branch of the survey one by one, checking if the answers given are also correctly recorded in the database?

there could always be relevance equations that make them skip certain questions or equations, if done wrongly, can also delete responses

This was my first guess.

But impossible to say more without seeing the survey.

Joffm
 

But impossible to say more without seeing the survey.

Exactly.

@Jenni: I can understand that you might/can not want to post the original survey for confidentiality reasons. However, without seeing the structure to rule out any issue within the survey, there is very little that can be said and done with the information we have.

What you can do, is create a copy of the survey, "anonymize" the questions and answer options if necessary and then export it. Depending on the size of the survey, this might of course be a lot of work. And given that you have 2 surveys connected, I assume that the first survey is fairly long?

Thank you, yes I can’t post for confidentiality reasons as my study is ethics approved so could be an issue if I post it - I will see what I can do in terms of posting a copy here.

The first survey consists of 3 sections -
1: demographics
2: main questions (which are essentially the same question repeated a number of times)
3: thanks and option to agree to further study (just an optional box to tick)

For the 5 incomplete responses I seem to only have the demographics despite participants completing all sections. I did ask one participant to click through the entire survey again to see if that would cause it to register but it didn’t seem to help.

How are your participants invited to this survey?
Is this a open or a closed survey? With a closed survey, check if the same token appears twice.

OK, so only demographics for those 5. Does your survey have quotas / screenouts?

What is strange is that they made it to the second survey (which they all have completed?). I assume that only those that ticked the box in section 3 would be redirected to the second survey?

How does the redirection to the second survey work? Automatically via end url redirect? Or do you show them a link?

2: main questions (which are essentially the same question repeated a number of times)

What does this mean exactly? Is this some kind of registration form, where they register the same information for an X amount of people / things?

How are these repeated questions shown? Depending on a previous question (e.g. number of people in Household?).

Are there any relevance equations?

An often unnoticed trap is when questions are used in a condition that are not defined due to another condition.
Then everything seems to be fine. But it's not.

As @holch
copy the survey, change the texts, but not the structure and send it.

Joffm