This guide will help you set up surveys where you need to identify the participants. Surveys can be set up to automatically include an identifier; here, we use a StudyID field, although a different unique identifier, such as a name or email address, could be used instead. Please note it is best to only do this in surveys that do not ask for any personal or sensitive data.
Prerequisites
Before you progress with this guide, you will need:
- Some experience with using SNAP 11 and the SNAP 11 web host
- A SNAP survey ready to be published
- A list of participants, email addresses and a unique identifier field - this guide will use the StudyID field as an example
Steps
1. Setting up your survey to include a database of respondents
Have your survey open in the SNAP 11 desktop app, then select File, then Publish. Scroll down until you see Paradata, then from this menu select Respondent, then tick Use in Survey. Once that has been done select Publish.
This will create an extra question field called ID.name. For this to function properly, this field must be hidden. To do this, highlight the ID.name field, right-click, then select Hide variables.
After it has been hidden, it should look like the below:
2. Setting up a database of your respondents
Open up Excel, or your spreadsheet software of choice, then create the following headers: Name, Email Address, StudyID
Please note that you can use the email address field as the identifier, if you are then the StudyID field can be removed.
3. Adding your participant database to your spreadsheet
On your SNAP survey, click on File, then Database link, then New. Tick the box for Webhost Invites/Logins/Seedings, then click Next.
Then, click on Select Database File, then navigate to and select the spreadsheet with your participants, then in the Select the Table to use section, select the sheet in your spreadsheet that has the participant information in it. Click Next.
Now, tick the Log in respondent option, then select the login field as the identifier you want to use (here we are using StudyID), tick both the Send email invitations and reminders and Seed database data into questionnaires options, then tick the 'Identify respondents in the response data' option. Click Next. The 'Respondent' paradata variable was set up at the start of this guide. If you still need to do this, please see step 1. Setting up your survey to include a database of respondents above.
Now you will use the text box to write your invitation and reminder emails. Remember to include a survey location, to link to your survey. To add this, click on Insert then Survey location. You will then see another text box where you can enter something relevant like 'Click Here' or the title of your survey.
Your email should look something like the image below. You should also have the Automatically log into survey option ticked. Click Next.
You will now see the screen below which lists the database fields that you can feed into your survey. Here you can set your identifying field to the SNAP Variable ID.name from the drop-down menu. You can also set any other fields you wish to populate back into the survey at this stage using the drop-down menus next to each database field. Once finished, click Next.
You should now see a small summary screen with all your settings. If all looks correct click Finish, to complete the setup; if changes are required, click ‘Back’ to return to an earlier section. Once finished, you can click on close in the Database linkage window.
Now that the participant database has been linked to your survey, you can publish it on the SNAP webhost (a guide on how to do this can be found online - Uploading Surveys to the Snap Webhost). You can also test if your invitations are working by sending one to yourself from the Messages tab in the webhost.
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