In general, you should never change a published survey with submissions. Survey responses are recorded in your reports, and if enabled, participants can view survey results after responding.
Participants are unable to edit their responses to address any new questions.
Changing a published survey can have the following impacts:
Incomplete survey responses: if a survey has multiple pages, registered respondents can save partial responses to complete later. Any changes to a published survey will delete these partial responses, requiring participants to start again.
Inaccurate data analysis after making changes, such as:
Editing options for question types, such as Radio buttons and Checkboxes
Adding or removing questions and replacing them with others
Changing skip or conditional logic
Reordering questions
This is not an exhaustive list, and other scenarios may affect your data; we strongly recommend you don’t edit published surveys at all.
In a situation in which you must amend a published survey, we recommend:
Clone the survey and make the necessary changes.
Publish and distribute the cloned survey.
Unpublish the original survey.
This process results in separate datasets, which you’ll need to combine but will ensure that your data is more accurate.
Contact our support team if you need any further assistance via chat or email support@engagementhq.com