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Online surveys  (formerly BOS)

Powerful, flexible online surveys

Anonymising your response data ADVANCED

Whether hidden or not, pre-populated questions are treated in the same way as any other survey responses and are included in the summary of your Analyse page. Here you can, for example, compare response rates, set up filters to group responses by categories (e.g. different departments or regions), or cross-tabulate responses given by different groups of people.

If you are collecting personal or identifying information as part of survey access control (e.g. email addresses), you may wish to remove them before analysing the results to keep the survey anonymous. There are two ways of achieving this. You can use the question numbers in the left-hand box of your Analyse page to hide certain questions, including pre-populated ones, and save this view before continuing with the analysis or sharing the data with others. You can also permanently delete the personal details (or all pre-populated data).

To permanently discard the pre-populated data:

  1. Click on Advanced and select Pre-population data from the drop-down menu.
  2. Click one of the buttons to either just Delete username, token, password and email fields or Delete all fields.
  3. You will be asked to confirm the deletion. This action cannot be reversed.

All details have now been removed from your survey data and can no longer be linked to any individual responses.

For more information about maintaining anonymity in your survey, please see our FAQ on respondent anonymity.