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I want to conduct a anonymous survey, which is rather sensitive regarding data protection laws, with a closed group of participants. I know this can supposedly be done in Limesurvey.

But in the participant list there are two columns which show who completed the survey. This is a problem from a data protection point of view, since it significantly increases chances to attach an answer to a participant. Let's say I have 100 participants and 5 answers, I know which 5 people supplied the answers.

My data protection team wants this information of who completed the survey to not be accessible to me.

Is there a way to hide these fields in a survey, or would this be a feature request?

 

I don't think there is a setting for that and I don't think a "feature request" would be attended in a reasonable time frame.

Why not simply use a open survey and send the anonymous link to respondents? As you are not allowed to know who has answered already and thus can't send individual reminders to those that haven't yet, I don't see a good reason to use tokens. OK, maybe to avoid that people answer more than once, or that people outside of the target group hold of the link and answer as well, but this could happen with individual links as well, of course would have smaller impact then, because they can only answer once for that token link. Not sure if this is an issue in your case.

If you need to use tokens for whatever reason, I would separate sending the invitations and the control of the data in two different people. E.g. you are the one that has control over the Limesurvey installation and you can see which token has answered already. However, another person sends the invitations with token links outside of Limesurvey and you do not connect names to the tokens in Limesurvey. You just create dummy participants and then create token links (via Excel for example) and provide these links to the person that is sending the invitations. This way, the person that sends the invitation might know who has received a specific token, but doesn't have access to the survey, thus doesn't know if and what that specific person has answered. You know which token has answered, but you don't know who the token belongs to.

We use a token based survey because we have a clearly defined target group and want to avoid people answering more than once. Apart from that we don't really care who answered and who not, on the contrary as described before, since it decreases anonymity.

Thank you for the suggestion with splitting the invitation process on two different people with different access. That might well be a solution, even though it could be tedious with hundreds of participants.

Another solution might be to lock out the survey creators during the execution of the survey so that only the Limesurvey administrator has access. After the survey is finished the participant list can be deleted by the administrator, and the survey creators get access again to the survey, which then holds only the answers.

That might well be a solution, even though it could be tedious with hundreds of participants.

Hmmm, I don't see why this would be tedious. You create a dummy participant list very easy in any spreadsheet (fake names, fake emails. I usually use just increase a number at the end of 'firstname' and 'lastname', same works for email), then you upload it and let Limesurvey create the tokens, then you download it, get one of the token links from the participant table just as a reference and then create the token links in a spreadsheet by joining the first part of the link that stays the same with the token, so that the links look like the one you copied.

Then the second person can send invitations with these links via a different mass email solution. All this can probably be setup and done in 10-20 Minutes.

Keeping the survey creator out is also a solution. Ideally they create the survey outside of the installation where it will be run (make sure the version is the same) and don't even have an account on the production installation.

Then the Super Admin imports the survey and the contact list for them, runs the survey and at the end exports the results without the personal data.

Even easier, Limesurvey can create e.g. 500 dummy users with tokens at the press of a button, which then can be exported to csv and used for mass mailing.

Also a great suggestion to work with two different Limesurvey instances, one for drafting and one for production, and then import the survey into the production instance. Thank you.

[quote[Even easier, Limesurvey can create e.g. 500 dummy users with tokens at the press of a button,[/quote]
You are right. Totally forgot about this option, because in my case when I use this approach, it is usually for distributing survey links / tokens to interviewers and they get fairly simple tokens that reflect their ID and a number.

which then can be exported to csv and used for mass mailing.

Correct, but afaik you can't export the token link. But there my example with creating the token link via spreadsheet software and formula for each token.

Or does LS6 permit the export of the token link? Need to have a look into this, haven't used this approach in a while.

While there exist workarounds to solve this issue, I would still love to see a Limesurvey which allows to execute such anonymous token based surveys without workarounds.

In my view sensible additions would be:

• Being able to limit users views on surveys, so they can e.g. only see the participant list or the answers.
  • Might be more granular, e.g. hiding certain columns in the answers or participant list
• Or offer it as an option at the survey start to not see the participants answer status

community.limesurvey.org/feature-request/

Already included except 1 point manual.limesurvey.org/Survey_permissions/en

pa_hee wrote:

Being able to limit users views on surveys, so they can e.g. only see the participant list or the answers.

Admin user with only Token/View survey permission

pa_hee wrote:

Or offer it as an option at the survey start to not see the participants answer status

Admin user with only Statistic or response survey permission