Partial Responses

Partial responses are surveys which have not been fully completed and are not included in the report summary. A partial response once a respondent has clicked 'Next Page' on a survey for the 1st time.

If your survey is a single-page survey, a partial response will not be recorded if a respondent starts but does not finish the page.

Reviewing partial responses can be very useful to help you determine where respondents are dropping out.

How a response is identified as 'Partial'

For a partial response to be recorded, the survey must have more than one page, and the respondent must have done the following:

  1. Loaded the first page of the survey
  2. Clicked the button to proceed from the first page to the next one
  3. Not "Finished" or been "Disqualified" either on the last page or due to Skip Logic or Terminal Pages

Responses that are marked as complete, but with answers missing, are not considered 'Partial'

A response is marked as complete when the respondent gets to the last page and clicks the Finish Survey button. Respondents need not have answered every question in the survey. Common reasons for this behavior are:

Accessing Partial ResponsesAn example summary overview box for a Survey. "View Partial Responses" is highlited with a red box

  1. Go to the Analyse tab of your survey
  2. In the overview section, on the left, click "View Partial Responses". This will not appear if the survey has no partial reponses.

Changing a Partial response to a completed one

You can change the status of Partial responses to be considered as Completed responses:

  1. After accessing the partial responses, use the First, Prev, Next and Last buttons in the upper-right to navigate to the response you want to edit.
  2. Click Force Complete, and confirm. This will move the response into the completed list, leaving any unanswered questions blank.
  3. You will need to repeat this process for each partial response you wish to be considered as complete.

Force-completing a response can have some undesired side-effects. Be careful if you are using filters which might be filtering on an answer that the forced-complete response did not answer. Also, questions that are "required" on pages after the partial response was stopped will not be filled-in which also might be an issue if you are expecting those answers for any reason

Force-completing a response can lead to duplicate responses for the same respondent. This can happen if the respondent stops part-way through and starts the same survey again from the beginning. Depending on the survey settings, this could create a completely new response which they might e.g. finish. If you you then force-complete their partial response, you will have two responses for that person.

Exporting Partial Responses

Partial Responses can be exported using the Export Tool.

To export partial responses, access the Export tool by clicking Export from the white navigation bar inside the Analyse tab, Choose "Raw Response Data" as the export type, and then activate the "Partial Responses Only" option in the "Filters" section of the "Customise" tab.

Then complete the export process as with any other export.

Deleting or Editing Partial Responses

Because Partial Responses may still be in progress with the respondent still intending to interact with them, They cannot be edited or individually deleted. To Edit or Delete a partial response, it needs to be forced to complete first, using the instructions above. Partial responses can be deleted in bulk using the Clear Responses feature.

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