How to Design a Survey with Data Validation

Meaningful survey data must be quality data. What use is low-quality data? If the data you collect is suspect, then the conclusions you draw and the insights you develop from that data are also going to be suspect.

The Zarca platform has a variety of controls in place to get the best-quality data possible during your survey design.

Ensuring Honest Responses: Anonymity

Anonymity can be a powerful factor when it comes to taking a survey. Sometimes it’s difficult for respondents to be completely forthcoming when they know their feedback will be scrutinized.

For example, it would be very hard to guarantee honest responses when administering a management critique online survey to employees who may fear being viewed negatively if they are too candid.

Instead, Survey Administrators should use anonymous responses in their survey design. This feature allows the participant’s identity to be completely masked. The only information viewable by Survey Administrators will be the end results.

Apply Anonymity Feature to Ensure Honest Responses

Prevent Multiple Survey Submissions: One Response Per Respondent

To minimize the data being skewed, we’ve implemented a survey design feature to for Survey Administrators to ensure surveys receive only one response per participant.

This is called a “Private Survey with Unique Key”, meaning it’s only accessible via email or a unique key, and the respondent can only respond to the survey once.

The “Private Survey with Unique Key” allows for the greatest amount of control over your online survey. The survey respondent accesses this survey via email or a unique code, and once the survey is submitted, the links in the respondent's email will no longer permit access.

This type of online survey allows for only one response per respondent, commonly referred to as the prevention of “ballot-box-stuffing”.

Private with Unique Key Survey

Set an Expiration Date

If the timing of your survey is a heavy factor in the response to your survey, or you know how many responses will make up the best data population, the “Set Expiry Rule” feature allows the Survey Administrator to expire the survey after a set number of responses are received.

Time your surveys easily