{"id":167,"date":"2024-11-30T23:40:37","date_gmt":"2024-11-30T13:40:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xinranhu.com\/?p=167"},"modified":"2024-12-01T20:00:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-01T10:00:03","slug":"offline-qualtrics-mailing-lists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xinranhu.com\/index.php\/2024\/11\/30\/offline-qualtrics-mailing-lists\/","title":{"rendered":"So you want to use Qualtrics for longitudinal survey…"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Disclaimer<\/summary>\n

I am not a survey professional, so this may well be reinventing the wheel, or even pointing out the obvious.
This article is accurate as per Nov 2024. Future Qualtrics updates might impact the validity of this approach.
I also highly suspect that Qualtrics is not the most efficient tool for this aim. I’m mainly writing this for archival purposes and, um, showing… off?
I’m also skipping the Qualtrics basic basics as they are not this article’s focus. A lot of stuff would be very self-explanatory as long as you’re willing to play with the infrastructure for a bit.<\/small><\/p>\n<\/details>\n\n\n\n

(The data and survey used in this article as illustration can be found here<\/a>. Feel free to download and experiment with them!)<\/em><\/small><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ah, Qualtrics. The survey platform people use for online surveys on a daily basis. It should be a surprise to no one that you can also conduct offline surveys with it, but do you know that it’s possible to conduct offline longitudinal surveys using Qualtrics?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this article, “offline longitudinal household surveys” refers to situations where a surveyor can access the entire list of respondents<\/strong> and any respondent-specific pre-existing information<\/strong> that needs to be verified and updated offline<\/strong> at any time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So this begs two questions: How to feed pre-existing data into Qualtrics survey questions<\/strong>, and how to ensure that Qualtrics knows which values correspond to which respondent<\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The solution lies in a functionality called mailing lists<\/strong><\/a>. As the name suggests, mailing lists in Qualtrics are not designed for offline surveys – They are actually for distributing surveys via email, which is the direct opposite of our aim.
Yet if something works, it works! With some clever workarounds, a mailing list can serve as a respondent directory for an offline survey.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually, a mailing list is just any .csv data table with some inconvenient compulsory fields<\/strong>. Hence as long as all the necessary fields are populated in a way expected by the Qualtrics engine, we are free to smuggle any other variables along with them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find the compulsory fields here<\/a>. To be more precise, as long as your .csv file contains fields called FirstName<\/strong>, LastName<\/strong>, and Email<\/strong> (That also pass the RegEx check for valid names and email addresses), Qualtrics will treat it as a legitimate mailing list. Any other fields will be treated as so-called “embedded data”, which can be passed on to survey questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The trick here is that since we are not planning to distribute our survey via email, you don’t have to populate the field Email<\/strong> with actual email addresses. I didn’t risk experimenting otherwise, but each entry in the mailing list seems to require a unique “email address”. I usually populate this field with something like [a number]@[a fabricated web domain].<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other two compulsory fields, FirstName<\/strong> and LastName<\/strong> can be used to hold the identifying information relevant to the surveyors. The Qualtrics offline survey app displays entries in a mailing list as “FirstName – LastName – Email”, which offers quite some display space. I personally prefer to put a household’s ID in the field FirstName, and the respondent’s full name in the field LastName. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an illustration, here’s a “mailing list” created using Stata’s complimentary bpwide.dta dataset:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Alright. You have a list. Now it’s time to put everything together. Let’s start with uploading the list to your Qualtrics account.
One slightly counterintuitive quirk of Qualtrics is that the mailing lists are actually completely independent from any survey<\/strong> – One list can be used in multiple surveys, and vice versa. Therefore, the mailing lists are not uploaded as part of a survey, but in a different panel called Directories<\/strong>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Once you’re there, the next steps should be pretty self-explanatory:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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