Samples

A sample stores all the responses from Survey participants. The first time that a Survey is published, a sample will be automatically created for you. On subsequent publishing, you can choose to either reuse the same sample, or to create a new one.

If you significantly alter a Survey between publishing, for example by adding extra questions or removing options from existing questions in your Survey, a new sample will automatically be created for you when the Survey is next published.

The results from the first sample and the results from this newly modified Survey cannot be stored together - as they are too different to make sense. This approach ensures that the integrity of response data from previous versions of the Survey remains intact, but still allows you to modify a live Survey as necessary.

Samples can also be used to separate batches of responses. For example, if you held an annual customer satisfaction survey, that used the same questions, you could re-use the same Survey from within the management console. In order to keep the results from year to year separate and able to be directly compared you could create a new Sample for each year.

When a new sample is not created for you automatically, you can choose to have a new one created when publishing. This is useful for occasions when you manually want to separate out responses, but the Survey question content has not changed significantly.

Significant changes to a Survey's design do not automatically trigger a new Sample to be created at publish time.