To deploy a pop-up survey, access to both the Qualtrics XM Survey platform and the Website / App Feedback product — formerly known as Site Intercept — is required. Website / App Feedback must be purchased for an additional cost. A pop-up survey or survey invite can be triggered not only by use of specific web pages but also by actions, such as clicking to download digital objects or hovering over digital objects. Qualtrics help pages on the specific features of this platform relevant to point-of-use surveys are listed below.
Qualtrics is a robust, enterprise-level survey platform with several different versions of the XM platform for various types of research and survey use. You can open a free Qualtrics survey account that allows you to create surveys with limited templates and functionality, and allows one active survey running at a time. The DesignXM solution is offered for individuals, but institutional-level enterprise subscriptions are the most common and cost-effective way to access Qualtrics. For those working at institutions that already have site licenses (such as large libraries or research universities), it is a powerful tool to use for your survey. Qualtrics provides extensive, free documentation with in-depth guides to developing, distributing, and managing surveys, as well as sharing information and survey management with other account holders.
Practitioners should follow the practices laid out in the “Ethical considerations and guidelines for the assessment of use and reuse of digital content.” The Guidelines are meant both to inform practitioners in their decision-making, and to model for users what they can expect from those who steward digital collections.
Because Qualtrics is primarily enterprise software, practitioner accounts are typically part of an institutional site license. Qualtrics has several ways of grouping account holders and allowing them to share information, including Divisions, Groups, and the “Collaborate” feature. Users can share surveys as well as Library content, including Contact Lists — lists of people to whom survey recruitment emails are sent, often including associated demographics or other personal data — with groups of other staff. Practitioners should understand the ways in which respondents’ and contacts’ personal data is shared within the software and should limit access to personal and sensitive data according to institutional privacy policies and best practices.
A Contact List may associate sensitive data with an individual’s identity that should not be accessible to all staff in a Group. Examples include data like race, age, or salary, as well as survey responses from a prior survey associated with names and email addresses. Sensitive data should be shared with as few staff as possible. Contact Lists containing sensitive data should only be shared to Group libraries if all members of the Group need access to the List. Contact Lists within Qualtrics should be deleted once they are no longer needed for survey deployment, and Group members should be cleared on a regular basis if staff or student workers are no longer part of the team.
When sharing a survey with a Group or with collaborators, Qualtrics allows the practitioner to select which functionality will be shared. Collaborators will only be able to view response data if “View Reports” is selected. If collaborators are meant to assist in building or reviewing the survey instrument without access to the data, the survey should be shared without “View Reports” capabilities.
Note: many survey platforms provide pop-up survey capabilities. Two other examples are included in this toolkit.
Note: There are numerous survey creation tools. Only three other examples are provided in this toolkit.
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