Confidentiality and answers to open-ended questions
This article is part of Effectory's resources on confidentiality. For more information about our commitment to the confidentiality of participants' answers and the measures we take to guarantee it, please refer to this article.
Answers to open-ended questions offer valuable qualitative insights. However, the responses they capture are far more traceable than quantitative scores. Recognizing the sensitivity of this qualitative data, Effectory adopts a strict approach when reporting answers to open-ended questions:
- Confidentiality measures: To ensure the confidentiality of individual responses, answers to open questions are only reported in the survey's inviting structure. On any other structures, open answers remain hidden. This measure minimizes the risk of individual traceability across various reporting structures.
- Language consistency: Only one language is used for the reporting of answers to open questions. This approach addresses the potential risk of individual traceability in organizations with multiple languages. Open comments written in a language different from the survey's default language are automatically translated into the default language.
- Minimum number of respondents: Answers to open-ended questions for groups with less than five respondents are not shown at that specific group level, nor at the direct parent group level. Instead, these answers are first shown one level further up in the reporting structure. If anonymity still cannot be guaranteed at that level, the answers are moved further up the reporting structure until a group is reached where the anonymity threshold is met.
In Your Feedback, respondents therefore only see these answers at this higher level, which prevents them from deducing which small underlying group they came from.
Tip! You can read more about the minimum group size and minimum number of respondents in this article.