Hello everyone and thank you if anyone has hints ...

I have made a survey and successfully gotten replies, but now I have the problem of having severel replies by one participant. Especially tricky is that for one participant in the participant menu when I click on the button to show me the given reply, I get one of the two which is not complete. The other reply, which is complete, is not connected to the participant (to be exact, not in the participants menu). Is there a way to match one certain reply as the valid one to a participant?

I hope someone gets what I am asking
Thanks,
Andreas

LimeSurvey
Version 3.14.9+180917

Maybe manual.limesurvey.org/Participant_settings
Enable token-based response persistence

I am not sure if I get what your problem is.

I assume you are using tokens, correct?

So depending on your settings for the tokens your respondents are starting all over as long as they have never completed a survey. To avoid this and for them to continue where they have left the survey you can use the token based answer persistence as Denis suggested.

However, if you use tokens, you should be able to see all responses (complete and incomplete) that have been given by this specific token. So I am not 100% sure what your problem is.

Thank you for your responses.

When I started the survey I had not activated token based answer persistence, and then after I heard of a few participants that they had trouble continuing to work on their surveys, I activated that.

Maybe now I am having as a result of that the chaos of multiple replies to the survey from one participant.

To be exact, after I realized I had a problem with the participants finishing the survey replies, I activated more than one time usage of the survey in a few individual participants settings menu .

Then in the participants menu (inside survey menu) I activated the option for the participants to be able to place multiple replies. That I should probably not have done.

Sorry for the mess, I am a first time user.

Thanks for reading and if anyone understands my problem and has a suggestion for the initial question (how can I assign one certain reply to one participant) I am still thankful for your advice.

In any case, you should have the token associated to an answer. Due to your configurations you can have various complete answers (but I don't think that people would go through to the end more than once, this should be rare cases). You might have various answers from the same person, but most of them should be unfinished anyway.

Can you show us an example where you can't associate an answer with a token? Because if you use the closed mode (with tokens) it should not be possible to have answers without tokens.

But now reading your question again, you say you don't have the complete answer. This sounds to me as if the person simply has not completed it. Because obviously your survey is saving the responses to the database, so I don't see why a complete response should not be saved. How do you know this person completed the survey?

What I did now was to delete the answer that was incomplete (I am working with not -anonymized setting) and then in the participants list, clicking on the answer adhering to him/her the completed answer was automatically assigned, probably because as you say the token was the same. I checked for that to be sure first.

So, both answers were saved but when I was in the participants list and trying to check the answers given by each one, I had the "wrong" meaning the incomplete answer shown to me. After deleting that in the answers menu it worked ok.

I guess I am going to have a lot of hussle now figuring out which of the participants have incomplete answers assigned to them in order to export and evaluate results.

(side information: I am not in the strict sense doing a survey, it is more of an information collection process of members of an organization, with a few statistically relevant data)

No, that can't be it...

Why don't you export all the answers (completed and incomplete) to excel, then sort via the token? Then you should see all responses for a specific token and there should be only one complete, if you did not increase the number of tokens left.