qualtrics_survey

Pulling and Displaying Data from a Qualtrics Survey on a Github Pages Website

We have a fake survey about favorite colors and emotions named Test Survey in use in my University of Michigan qualtrics account.

library(tidyverse)

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
✔ ggplot2   3.5.1     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
✔ lubridate 1.9.3     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
✔ purrr     1.0.2     
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

library(qualtRics)

Note that the qualtrics API key is stored in both my local .Renviron file for rendering locally (good for testing), and in a Github Actions repository secret for running as a Github Action. The GHA is directed by a separate .github/workflows/publish.yml file on push (when I push changes to the repo to Github) or on a cron schedule that runs once weekly on Sundays to update the website.

We do our editing of this quarto document, and of the publish.ymldocument on the main branch, and publish to Github Actions from the gh-pages branch.

Let’s use this to read in data the from Test Survey.

Note that we had to change our qualtrics site base url from https://umich.qualtrics.com/ to yul1.qualtrics.com because it was being proxied.

This is per known issue #339 for the qualtrics package.

https://github.com/ropensci/qualtRics/issues/339

Details on using the qualtRics package can be found at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/qualtRics/vignettes/qualtRics.html.

Set up credentials:

Note that we use Sys.getenv("API_KEY") to retrieve the specific API key for qualtrics credentials. This works both locally for keys stored in the .Renviron file and remotely for Github Actions repository secrets.

CTA1 <-Sys.getenv("CTA1_QAK")
api_key = Sys.getenv("QUALTRICS_API_KEY")

qualtrics_api_credentials(api_key, 
          base_url = "yul1.qualtrics.com",
          install = TRUE,
                    overwrite = TRUE)

Your original .Renviron will be backed up and stored in your R HOME directory if needed.

Your Qualtrics key and base URL have been stored in your .Renviron.  
To use now, restart R or run `readRenviron("~/.Renviron")`

readRenviron("~/.Renviron")

Now we can read in some data on my available surveys.

surveys <- all_surveys()
surveys |> select(id, name)

# A tibble: 2 × 2
  id                 name                                           
  <chr>              <chr>                                          
1 SV_2iCsA0KAvqgfUqO Test Project Survey                            
2 SV_5tCvAXpz3E8fVFI Qualtrics Connector for Canvas- Survey Template

Now read in some fictional data from one particular Test Survey,
and display a simple table of responses.

my_survey <- fetch_survey(surveyID = 'SV_2iCsA0KAvqgfUqO')

  |                                                                            
  |                                                                      |   0%
  |                                                                            
  |======================================================================| 100%

── Column specification ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
cols(
  .default = col_double(),
  StartDate = col_datetime(format = ""),
  EndDate = col_datetime(format = ""),
  Status = col_character(),
  IPAddress = col_character(),
  Finished = col_logical(),
  RecordedDate = col_datetime(format = ""),
  ResponseId = col_character(),
  RecipientLastName = col_logical(),
  RecipientFirstName = col_logical(),
  RecipientEmail = col_logical(),
  ExternalReference = col_logical(),
  DistributionChannel = col_character(),
  UserLanguage = col_character(),
  Q1 = col_character()
)
ℹ Use `spec()` for the full column specifications.

my_survey |> 
  select(Q1:Q3_3) |> 
    drop_na() |> 
  purrr::set_names(c('fav_color', 'anxiety', 'depression', 'happiness')) |> 
  head()

# A tibble: 5 × 4
  fav_color anxiety depression happiness
  <ord>       <dbl>      <dbl>     <dbl>
1 red            47         74        20
2 blue           16         47        25
3 red            47         15        49
4 blue           23         35        94
5 red            37         10        66

We would not publish the raw data from a survey like this (this one is fake) to a website, as it would be disclosing identifiable information about the participants. Qualtrics is considered HIPAA-compliant.

But we can read in the data and provide ongoing updates/analysis to our colleagues and collaborators with the data. Let’s share a plot or two of the incoming data with our colleagues.

Emotional scores

We have 5 rows of data from 6 participants thus far.

my_survey |> 
  select(Q1:Q3_3) |> 
  drop_na() |> 
  purrr::set_names(c('fav_color', 'anxiety', 'depression', 'happiness')) |> 
  select(anxiety, depression, happiness) |> 
  pivot_longer(cols = anxiety:happiness, 
               names_to = 'emotion', 
               values_to = 'score') |> 
  ggplot(aes(y = emotion, x = score)) +
  geom_violin() + geom_point() +
  theme_linedraw() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  labs(title = "Distribution of Emotion Scores")

Favorite Colors

We have 5 rows of data from 6 participants so far.

my_survey |> 
  select(Q1:Q3_3) |> 
  drop_na() |> 
  purrr::set_names(c('fav_color', 'anxiety', 'depression', 'happiness')) |> 
  mutate(value =1) |> 
  ggplot(aes(x="", y = value, fill = fav_color)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", width = 1) +
  theme_linedraw() +
  theme(legend.position = "none") +
  labs(title = "Distribution of Favorite Colors") +
  labs(x = "", y = "Count") +
  scale_fill_manual(values = c("red", "blue"))

Add timestamp

[1] "This was rendered at 2024-06-14 06:14:37.172802"