Qualtrics Survey Support

There are processes and policies to be mindful of. Find more info on the Surveying UC Students: Procedures, Policies, and Survey Calendar page here.

Qualtrics Support, in the form of their "XM Basecamp," offers comprehensive guides covering basic and advanced features. The advantage of these resources is that you can watch them anywhere, anytime, and skip through to the most relevant parts.

Start with “Building a Survey Project,” and  “Planning and Designing a Survey.” A more advanced learning module that is beneficial for academic research is “Applying Best Practices in Questionnaire Design.”  
Find the entire range here (you will need to log in using “Qualtrics Credentials” to access these).

We’re glad you’re using one of the best survey platforms in the world to conduct your research! The single best piece of advice we can offer is to test your survey before distribution. We have encountered many sad and frustrated researchers who deploy a survey before it is ready. Test your survey yourself, with your peers, and if you have no one else, feel free to email surveys@canterbury.ac.nz if you want a second pair of eyes to check it over. You might only get one chance to collect your data, so ensure your data collection is as good as possible! 

Qualtrics has a great function which will generate “dummy” responses to your survey. Generate any number of responses, export the test data, and investigate it. Have you designed your survey to capture data in the formats you need for your subsequent analysis?  

For example, maybe you set up the survey question to capture categorical data, but perhaps you realise you need continuous data (e.g., age bands, versus age as a continuous variable).

Qualtrics Support has a great outline of how to accomplish this. Check out the webpage here, particularly the sections “About Creating an Anonymized Raffle,” “Survey One: Main Study,” and Survey Two: Manual Raffle.”  

Note: when you test this out, ensure you are using your actual survey link. Using the Preview Survey link will result in a message that says you are not authorised to view that survey; this is because of the “referral website URL” setting you will have set up.

UC Qualtrics accounts are automatically disabled when a year has passed without logging in. Your surveys and data are always saved, but you will need to email surveys@canterbury.ac.nz to re-enable your account.

To ensure you always have access to your data, before you graduate, we advise downloading the survey and response data (assuming you have permission to do so) and storing them on secure servers. 

Once you have left UC you should not be actively collecting new survey data using UC Qualtrics. We never delete UC Qualtrics accounts, but if they are not logged in for over a year, they are disabled. If you attempt to log in and find your account is disabled, email surveys@canterbury.ac.nz to re-enable your account. We will check for an active student enrolment and can re-enable the account. 

To ensure you always have access to your data, before you leave UC, we advise downloading the survey and response data (assuming you have permission to do so) and storing them on secure servers. 

Once you have left UC you should not be actively collecting new survey data using UC Qualtrics. We never delete UC Qualtrics accounts, but if they are not logged in for over a year, they are disabled. If you attempt to log in and find your account is disabled, email surveys@canterbury.ac.nz to re-enable your account. We will check for an active staff contract and can re-enable the account.