Identifying your respondents provides some technological benefits within Baseline. However, there may be situations when guaranteeing anonymity is important.
You should collect identity (via mass mailing or validation screen) if you want to…
- See reports of individual respondents and connect them with a person (e.g., required survey, individuals’ surveys over time)
- Use the Cross Project Reporting feature. This feature allows you to view data from multiple Baseline projects (e.g., demographic variables from an upload, related surveys) within the context of one project’s results
- Create panels which allows you to save groups of identified respondents based on their survey responses or demographics. These panels can be used to create targeted reports or to send out future surveys to a certain group.
- Take advantage of the mass mailing system which automatically collects identity. (Please note that we can hide respondents’ identities from your campus, so you can still use this feature while preserving respondents’ anonymity)
You should not collect identity if…
- Your survey is a sensitive topic. Guaranteeing anonymity can help to reduce socially desirable responding and increase response rate.
- You went through the IRB process and they require your survey to be anonymous
- You will be administering the survey via generic link and know you will not be using any of the features above
**NOTE: Using the generic link without any validation screen is considered anonymous, meaning that neither Anthology staff nor the campus can track the identity of the respondent in any way with this survey link. Using a validation screen, or using the mass mailing feature, means that the respondent's identifier (either email or ID, depending on your settings) is collected by Anthology While Anthology does have the ability to hide the respondent's identifier from the Baseline user who is collecting this data, it still technically exists and can be un-hidden upon request. Therefore, if you choose to use the mass mailing tool or validation screen as your data collection method, be advised that you should not advertise your survey as anonymous; we recommend using language to say that your survey is "confidential," since access to respondent IDs is controlled by permissions to Baseline and not inherently available to the general public.