Some questions may contain personal or sensitive information, such as addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, salary details, or medical and demographic data. When a question is marked as “contains private answers”, the data is excluded from exports by default.
These questions are generally not used for statistical analysis, but for practical purposes after data collection, such as newsletter subscriptions or sending survey results. The answers of these questions are stored separately in the database and are easy to remove if needed.
For example, if respondents provide their e-mail address for a lottery, this question can be marked as private. After the lottery has been completed, the e-mail addresses can be deleted without affecting the remaining data.
In Excel and SPSS exports, as well as in the response overviews, private answers are shown in a masked format. It remains visible how many respondents answered the question, but only users with the appropriate access rights can view the unmasked data. More information about these access rights can be found here.
Questions with private answers are marked with a fingerprint icon in the tree view, making them easy to distinguish from the others.