Collect Emailadress in a survey - data security

Question

Hello,

I want to do a survey with three measurement points:
Measurement point 1(t1): before a 30-minute walk in the field
Measurement point 2(t2): after a 30-minute walk.
Measurement point 3(3): Ten days later.

At t1 and t2 I will be where the walk starts and ends and give them the tablets to answer the questionnaires. T3 will take place 10 days later and participants will answer the questionnaire at their homes.

I want to look at changes over time, so I need to be able to assign the data of t1 of one person to the corresponding t2 and t3 data to see, if there are changes over time. I could do that by including a question with a personal identification code, but my experience has shown that people forget the code or there are a lot of mistakes which make it impossible to assign the datasets of the different measurement points of one person to each other. Thus, I would like to have personalised, but still pseudonymous accesess for each participant in my survey somehow. First I thought of collecting the email adress of the participants in questionnaire 1 and sending them a personalised link on their email adress, which is somehow marked, so I can assign it to a identification code instead of the participant. But the thing is that I want to realise a offline survey, so participants will not have internet access during the experiments on the tablets I give them, to answer the questionnaire. Which other possibilities are there for surveys with various measurement points to assign the data of the measurement points to each other?

Further, I need to collect the email address of the participants, because I want to send them a file containing a task they should fulfill when they are at home. Is there a possibility to send a simple word document via sawtooth to a mail adress? And since the email address is personal data, the email address should be saved separately from the rest of the responses to the questionnaire, so it is still anonymous. Is there a possibility to do this? And do I need to sign some data security agreement for that?

Thank you for the help,
Regards
Julia

Comments

Regarding the technical aspects of this, I don't think the use of an offline survey for the first two parts would be an issue so long as you upload the data before the third measurement point needs to occur.  With the data uploaded and ten days having past, you could send the respondent a survey link made unique with the respondent number (or other identifier) from the first two measurement points.

I can't comment on the data security requirements you will need to satisfy.  My guess would be that those requirements would be dependent on the locations where the data is being collected.

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Thank you for your response.

Where can I find a description of how to send the respondents a survey link to their Email address with the respondent number from the first two measurement points?

And regarding data security. Other survey tools have the possibility to assess the email address of the respondents in the same data then the rest of the data, but to assess the email address in a way in which the email addresses afterwards appear in a seperate data file to the rest of the respondents data. So the answers to the questions can not be connected to the email address. I know that (being in Switzerland) normally for this you need to make a contract with the survey provider for data processing on behalf  (Vertrag zur Auftragsdatenverarbeitung). This is always necessary if personal data is collected (address, email address, ect.). Does Sawtooth provide this possibility as well?

Thank you for your help.

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If the first two measurement points are being collected offline, I think you'd need to pull the email addresses from the data itself and fire off the emails as needed.  This could be done by hand, but perhaps some emailer tools out there could be fed the email addresses and times to send to do the work for you.

I'm not well equipped to provide information about how our servers work.  If you contact our support team, they should be able to connect you to a server ops engineer who will know more than I.