Delete Individual Responses

In any survey process, some portion of the responses received will be erroneous or will include results that skew your data, especially if the survey is accessed by a public URL or sent to a large number of respondents. In order to improve the analysis you may need to delete one or more individual responses. In other cases, respondents may make a mistake and ask you to delete their response so they can start over.

SurveyMethods provides several ways to do this.

Delete Responses from the Individual Responses Report

You can delete responses one-by-one from the Individual Results report. To find this report, click on the Analyze icon () from the My Surveys page.

Then choose Individual Results in the Basic Reports section.

You can scroll through responses using the “Response [X] of [Y]” arrows, and you can delete any responses by clicking the Delete Response button.

You can use criteria analysis to filter respondents by responses to questions, the date and time the survey was taken, or custom field values, to make it easier to find the response.

Delete Responses from the Manage Email Invitees Menu

You can also delete responses from any specific invitee by navigating to the Manage Email Invitees menu. You can view and manage the email invitees from the manage survey menu or the analyze survey menu. To reach these, you can click on the Manage icon () or the Analyze icon () on the My Surveys page.

At the top of either menu you will see the survey response statistics and the right section shows the email deployment status. You can click the Manage Email Invitees link to view and manage your email invitee list.

You can delete all responses from any respondent by clicking the clear icon () next to the respondent’s email that you wish to delete.

Note: All deletions are permanent so make sure you are certain that you want to delete a response before confirming. Depending on when the response was deleted we may be able to recover it from a backup but there is a charge for this service as it is a very labor intensive process. For more information see our article on Recovering Deleted Responses.

You can also delete responses for multiple respondents by selecting the checkboxes and clicking the Delete Responses button at the top.

Please visit our separate articles on Deleting All Responses or Deleting All Partial Responses for more information on those topics.