It turns out the problem is the way Excel imports CSV files, which by default does not support UTF-8 data. There is an easy work around described by the Information Technology Group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton:

Follow the steps outlined below to use Microsoft Excel to open a .csv file that uses UTF-8 character encoding.

1. Open Microsoft Excel.
2. Click on the Data menu bar option.
3. Click on the From Text icon.
4. Navigate to the location of the file that you want to import.  Click on the filename and then click on the Import button.  The Text Import Wizard – Step 1 or 3 window will now appear on the screen.
5. Choose the file type that best describes your data – Delimited or Fixed Width.
6. Choose 65001: Unicode (UTF-8) from the drop-down list that appears next to File origin.
7. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard – Step 2 or 3 window.
8. Place a checkmark next to the delimiter that was used in the file you wish to import into Microsoft Excel.  The Data preview window will show you how your data will appear based on the delimiter that you chose.
9. Click on the Next button to display the Text Import Wizard – Step 3 of 3.
10. Choose the appropriate data format for each column of data that you want to import.  You also have the option to not import one or more columns of data if you want.
11. Click on the Finish button to finish importing your data into Microsoft Excel.

The technical team say that “iSurvey doesn’t do ‘soft deletes’ (marking records as deleted), so once the user hits delete, the data is deleted.”

iSurvey is backed up daily, but that is so we can restore the whole system in case of a catastrophic failure – for example if the server was hacked. Note that all data and survey edits since that backup was made would be lost.

So the golden rule is ALWAYS download a copy of the data before deleting any records.

If you are checking iSurvey regularly (maybe once each day) to look at any new responses to your survey, I would recommend downloading the data as part of that check. It never hurt to have too many backups, provided you store that data securely.

This is often due to ‘robots’ and search engine spiders that are trawling the internet.

If your survey is ‘online’ and public, you may see this occurring.

Because of this we’ve added a new feature ‘delete blank participants’ which will allow you to ‘one click’ clean up your participant dataset.

There are two ways of doing this.

Option 1. By appending the survey web address

This is best used if you have a single individual you want to send to. How to do this.

a) Get the ID number of the question you want to pre-populate.
You can find this by going to the question and editing it. Look in the URL and you will see the question ID. In the example below the question ID is 149739

b) Change the survey URL and append the question ID and response
Your survey URL will be something like this. www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/MYSURVEYID where MYSURVEYID is the ID of your survey. Change this to the following:
www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/start.php?id=MYSURVEYID
Check that works! If it looks ok,  append the URL with the following
‘&qid149739=My Response’
Where 149739 is THE ID NUMBER OF YOUR QUESTION.

The finished URL should look like this:
https://www.isurvey.soton.ac.uk/start.php?id=3271&qid149739=My Response

where id=3271 is your survey ID,  149739 is your question ID and ‘My Response’ is the text you wish to pre-populate the question.

Option 2 : Use the ‘Custom Data’ option in the Invitation Lists

Invitation lists let you send out emails to multiple participants at once by uploading a CSV containing their name and emails.

By populating the ‘Custom Data’ field you can pre-populate any question you wish with bespoke text for each participant.
The CSV file has the format:
Email Address, First Name, Last Name, Custom Data

The example below will pre-populate question ID 149739 with the text ‘AC345G’
johnsmith@soton.ac.uk, John, Smith, qid149739=AC345G

You can pre-populate many questions at once by adding a new question ID (qid) separated by ‘&’
e.g.  johnsmith@soton.ac.uk, John, Smith, qid149739=AC345G&qid149740=Male&qid149742=single

The time out feature ensures maximum security for your data. It’s essentially the same as logging in to your online bank – when you are ‘inactive’ for a while it automatically logs you out.

It is highly recommended if you are running large surveys that you do not have all your questions on one page. Break things up into sections, or have 4/5 questions per page for each section if you only have one section.

If a participant is timed out any data on that page will be lost.

This will obviously vary if their is a reward for completion e.g. payment, research credits etc..

You will also get an increased drop out rate if you have a particularly long survey with many questions.

Finally, it should be noted that each time you test your survey using the ‘Full preview’ mode a new participant is created.

If your dataset is only valid if you use 100% completers, a data download option for downloading ONLY complete datasets is available.

The 'blank answer' alert option

Please note that due to ethical reasons you CANNOT force participants to answer all questions before progressing to the next page- all iSurvey can do is alert them to the fact that they have missed some, and if they wish they can attempt to complete them.

There is also no limit to the number of surveys, sections or questions you want to create.

Options for online viewing include bar graphs, pie charts and 3d pies. Examples are shown below – note you can customised the colour, graph type and graph size.