Online surveys often offer a lottery to win a prize. Alternatively, one may want to send the results to interested participants. In either case you usually need participants' email addresses.
This would not be a problem using a simple text input - if participants' anonymity were not compromised by doing this. Further, collected data now become “personal data”, which are often subject to strict rules of data protection.
To warrant anonymity and collect an email address at the same time, SoSciSurvey offers a special question type: “Collect Email Addresses Separately”. Using it is very simple: create an according question within your project and insert it into your questionnaire at an appropriate position.
The input form offers 3 options, which you can edit and/or hide separately:
The first two functions store the email address within the project, separate from the remaining survey data.
The final option “SoSci Panel” stores the email address in the noncommercial SoSci Panel. This is a project supporting scientific research. it is a pool of people who like to participate in scientific research. Under certain conditions (see Onlineforschung.org) you may use this panel for your own project. Universities would benefit and surely appreciate, if you also include this option.
Important: The input field for the email address is initially hidden and only displayed once one of the options is selected. This is to emphasise the voluntary completion of the question.
Note: This question type still causes some problems in multi-language surveys. In order to adapt the response alternatives for a specific language, you first need to switch to the according language (via Further languages) and then edit the question. A simultaneous amendment for all languages is not possible, yet.
A couple of things to consider when storing the email addresses:
Below Download Data you can find a submenu Separately collected email addresses. Here, you can download the stored email addresses as a CSV file. This file can be opened with OpenOffice or Excel.
The file has 3 columns: The participant's information (e.g. email address) and two columns indicating whether the options “Lottery” and “Project Information” were selected. Whether someone registered for the SoSci Panel is not stored in the data.