Qualtrics - Security Recommendations

This article provides security recommendations for Qualtrics, focusing on optimizing general settings, response security, and accessibility features to safeguard survey data. Implementing these best practices helps ensure data integrity, privacy, and equitable access for all survey participants.

Settings Recommendations

Fake, automated survey responses CAN SLIP through and actively CORRUPT your results, IF YOU AREN'T CAREFUL. Bots can seriously undermine your research and data integrity, making your findings unreliable. To protect the accuracy of your surveys, take action now:

To assist with quality responses and to help detect and prevent fraudulent responses, it is recommended that the following settings be turned on, if possible.

1. General Settings

   • ExpertReview
     • It is recommended that this setting be enabled. Qualtrics will review your survey and provide recommendations for improvements.
     • Per Qualtrics, ExpertReview helps researchers ensure their surveys collect high-quality data. ExpertReview has 3 major functions:
       1. Measuring the data quality of the survey elements (questions, logic, quotas, etc.).
       2. Recommending how users should improve those elements and providing documentation for research-based explanations on these recommendations.
       3. Predicting the quality of the data that will be collected.

2. Responses Settings

   • It is highly recommended that the Response Settings are reviewed, specifically:
     • Automatic survey closure
       • This will automatically close surveys once the Expiration Date is reached.
       • Incomplete responses can still be gathered.
     • Survey availability
       • Enable the option “Set specific start and expiration date”
       • Define these times by editing survey availability.
       • These settings will help ensure the survey is closed in a timely manner and therefore not left open for bots to submit a flood of responses.
         

2. Security Settings

   • Survey Access
     • Determine if the survey will be available to anyone or if it is an invitation only survey.
     • Per Qualtrics:
       • Available to anyone: By default, respondents can take your survey either using the anonymous link or an individual link.
       • Invitation only: Only respondents sent a personal link or invited over email (with the default individual link) can access the survey. No one can enter the survey using the anonymous link or the multiple completes link
         • If your survey will be hosted on a webpage, it is not advisable to enable this setting; however, if you are emailing users with a link, this would be a good setting to utilize.
   • In Survey: Prevent multiple submissions
     • Determine if you will allow one person to submit multiple answers. If it is not needed for many answers from one person, enable this setting.
     • If you are using the survey to obtain information throughout the year from the same population, it may not be a good setting to enable.
   • Bot detection
     • It is recommended that this setting be enabled.
     • Per Qualtrics, Bot detection allows you to track which responses are likely bots by adding a field to each response called Q_RecaptchaScore. Every response is rated on the probability that the respondent was a bot, which you can then use to filter out data or build reports.
     • Please keep in mind that this needs to be enabled before collecting data.
     • It is also recommended to enable this step once you are done setting up your survey.
   • Security Scan Monitor
     • Prevent security scanners from accidentally starting surveys when they test your link
     • It is recommended that this setting be enabled.
   • Prevent Indexing
     • Block search engines from including your survey in their search results.
     • It is recommended that this setting be enabled to decrease the likelihood of bots and populations external to the study population accessing and responding to the survey.