✉ Inviting respondents
How many respondents do I need?
Number of respondents * amount of material per respondent * amount of overlap between respondents
To get useful results, the number depends on how much the things they say are likely to overlap. If you ask them which party they are going to vote for and why, you will find quite a lot of overlap. If you ask them about their parents’ life stories, you will have to ask more questions and/or ask more respondents to find enough overlap.
How are respondents invited?
You as survey editor invite respondents to participate simply via a web link. You can send that link to anyone you like.
Using personalised keys
At Qualia, we don’t store personally identifying information at all.
But what if you want to match up Qualia interview answers with respondent characteristics?
You can add a personalised key like
&key=1234 to the end of each individual invitation, so it looks like e.g. https://chat.qualiainterviews.com/?interview=school-days&key=1234. Use only alphanumeric characters with no spaces for your key. It’s easiest if you just use numbers like 7, 123, 999 etc.
You keep track of who you sent which invitation to, so that you know that e.g. key 1234 belongs to Jo Johannsen. You can keep this information separately in an Excel sheet.
An easy way to generate the URLs (and keep track of who is who) is by using a mail merge tool like YAMM. This can also help you track who has opened each email or clicked on the link.
Here is a spreadsheet to help you easily generate correct keys.
This is a template, so please to not edit this spreadsheet. To use it you should make a copy or download it and edit on your own copy.
When you download your data, if you have used Personalised keys you will see the key prepended to the session identifier like this:
key: 1234-13f08a0d2. You can use this key to e.g. merge back your respondent information from your Excel sheet. This functionality is very simple.
- There are no settings to change. Simply add keys to your invitations
- Your interview will still be available if someone fills it in without the personalised key in the URL - but you will be able to identify (and filter out) any such anonymous respondents when you download your data.
- This functionality is independent of the setting
Allow multiple responses. So if you want, you can allow respondents with keys to complete the interview more than once, or you can prevent this.