FAQ & Support

Currently, Purdue does not offer training. Here are some helpful links to content Qualtrics provides which should provide a nice starting point:

• Projects Basic Overview
• Creating a Project
• Survey Basic Overview
• Survey Publishing & Versions
• Creating Questions
• Formatting Questions

1. Log into https://purdue.qualtrics.com
2. Click the Help link at the top right of the page
3. Click the Contact support button
4. Click the Sign in with SSO link under the log in boxes
5. Enter "purdue" as the Organization ID (all lower case)
6. Log in using BoilerKey if you haven't already logged in
7. Click the "I have a different support request" button
8. Choose Survey Platform from the dropdown box
9. Click Chat button

Qualtrics is a secure platform for capturing sensitive or restricted information from survey participants, but there are some options that need to be in place to make sure nothing is compromised. In your Survey Options, ensure the following for each setting:

• Meta Description
  • Delete or leave blank unless there is a specific reason it needs to be set to something
• Open Access vs. By Invitation only
  • This option determines whether you can generate an anonymous link to send to anyone, or if you must invite specific people to take the survey. Consider your usage when selecting one of these options. With open access, users can take the survey relatively anonymously but anyone can access it. With invitation only, users will not be anonymous, but the survey will not be open to the public. Consider this option if the survey questions themselves have sensitive information in them, or if the questions need to be kept confidential for some other reason.
• Prevent Indexing (ON by default)
  • This option prevents search engines from discovering your survey page
• Secure Participant Files (ON by default)
  • This option keeps unauthorized Qualtrics users from viewing survey results. You can invite collaborators from the "tools" menu, next to the "Survey Options" menu.
• Survey Expiration (optional)
  • Enabling this will set a date beyond which the survey will be inaccessible. There may be practical reasons for leaving a survey up and running, so consider how often you will use a survey before selecting this option.
• Password Protection (optional)
  • Protects access to the survey with a password. The password must be sent separately to potential participants.

There is one more setting creators MUST select to secure their survey information. Under the Tools Menu, navigate to Triggers --> Email Triggers

Once there, you will find that the checkbox "Send an Email on Survey Complete" is checked, and cannot be unchecked. There is also a checkbox at the bottom of the window that says "Include Response Report."

If you want to be notified whenever a survey is completed ensure that the “Message” field has a short message in it, AND that the “Include Response Report” option is UNCHECKED. This way, Qualtrics will send an email to whomever the survey creator designates, but without including the potentially Sensitive or Restricted survey responses. If the message field is left blank, the email might not be sent.

This is important because when Qualtrics sends an email with the survey results, the message actually contains a link to the results. If an email containing this link is lost or compromised, ANYONE who has access to the email now has access to that survey result.

If you don’t want or need an email at all, go ahead and click the green "Save Triggers" button at the bottom of the window, then proceed to the following:

Return to the "Email Triggers" selection in the "Tools" menu. You should be presented with a window that looks similar to this:

This window displays all of the active email triggers for the survey. Click the red X to the right of the email trigger(s) to delete, then select "save triggers." Now, Qualtrics will NOT send emails upon survey completion at all.

Removing email results links or deleting triggers is incredibly important to the security of sensitive or restricted information, but if the survey does not involve such information the survey creator can use email triggers if they wish.

Once all necessary security selections have been made, be sure to "Publish" the survey to save changes. Clicking "Publish" will make the survey ready for distribution, but it WILL NOT auto-distribute. Survey creators must still manually distribute the survey from the "Distributions" menu.

You can set up a survey to only allow Purdue users to access it by using the SSO Authenticator: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-flow/advanced-elements/authenticator/sso-authenticator/#Shibboleth

Choose SSO as the authentication type, and check "Capture respondent identifying info" using the following values:

• username
  • uid
• email
  • mail
• FirstName
  • givenName
• LastName
  • sn
• displayname
  • urn:oid:2.16.840.1.113730.3.1.2411
• SSO type
  • Shibboleth

Editing live surveys is not recommended, but if you have to, information on editing and publishing can be found in these articles:

https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/testing-and-editing-an-active-survey/

https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/survey-publishing-versions/#PublishingChangestoActiveSurveys

You can use responses from earlier questions in the survey to pre-populate questions using piped-text. More on piped-text can be found in this article:

https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/editing-questions/piped-text/piped-text-overview/

You can set the question text type to Multi Line or Essay Text Box. Either of these options will increase the size of the text box when you publish it. You can also grab the bottom right corner of the text box to expand it to a size that is better for you. More information can be found in this article:

https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/survey-module/editing-questions/question-types-guide/standard-content/text-entry/

Enabling the Anonymize Responses setting is an effective way to permanently scrub a response of identifying information before saving it in the data. When responses are gathered with the Anonymous Link, enabling this setting will remove the respondents’ IP address and location data from your results.

When responses are gathered with the Individual Link, enabling this setting will remove the IP address and location data and disconnect the response from the contact who provided it. In this way, you can know which contacts have responded (through your distribution history and contact history), but not which response belongs to which contact.

Attention: Once you turn on the Anonymize Responses setting, your respondents’ identifying information is hidden. If this setting was turned on before a response was collected, that response’s identifying information will never be retrievable. If this setting was turned on after a response was collected, the response’s identifying information will be retrievable. Proceed with caution! Note, if you have XM Directory, this information will still be available in the contact’s Touchpoint Timeline after anonymizing responses. Please note that appending embedded data fields from XM Directory to a survey response may result in the survey response no longer being anonymous.

Read more at Qualtrics page on Anonymizing Responses 

Read more about the opt out link on the following qualtrics page dealing with distribution error messages: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/distributions-module/email-distribution/email-distribution-error-messages/#NoOptOutLink

 Qualtrics also recommnets having the people being surveyed add you to their address book to decrease liklihood of this issue: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/distributions-module/email-distribution/avoid-being-marked-as-spam/#AddTheFromAddressToYourAddressBook 

Qualtrics is whitelisted on Purdue's spam servers, so nothing should be blocked at that layer. 

If you are still having issues with this, please reach out to it@purdue.edu with the survey and user information.

This error typically occurs when recipients start a survey but dont finish it in the alotted time and the response was deleted. There are settings that can do this, such as the survey option to delete responses in progress after 1 week. 

More information can be found in this article: https://www.qualtrics.com/support/survey-platform/distributions-module/email-distribution/emails-overview/#DistributionAndSurveyExpiration