Lattice has recently released updated functionality that allows administrators to choose between our standard level of anonymity protection and our enhanced anonymity protection.
Before you start
- The ability to choose the level of protection will be available in both recently launched and closed surveys. It is also only available in Anonymous Engagement Surveys.
- All engagement surveys will default to basic protection but admins can change this setting at any time.
- To determine if a survey has the new feature available, navigate to your survey settings and check to see if Basic Protection and Strong Protection options are available.
- If you would like your Engagement results to reflect your experience prior to this new feature being released, select 'Basic Protection.'
Choose the level of protection
- Navigate to Admin > Engagement> Choose your survey.
- Click Setup > Settings.
- Under Indirect Identification Protection select Basic or Strong protection.
Strong protection
Strong protection is intended to protect groups smaller than the minimum participant threshold from indirect identification. Indirect identification occurs when responses for a group of low participants are hidden but their scores might still be identified by analyzing and filtering scores around that small group.
With strong protection enabled, if a group is smaller than the reporting group minimum threshold their results will not be displayed. In addition, the next smallest group’s responses will also be hidden to avoid indirect identification by selective grouping.
When viewing results in the Heatmap view, strong protection calculates anonymity thresholds for each cell. For example, in the Heatmap, when grouping by Office Location, NY and Dublin met the threshold for some questions but not all and therefore, those particular question scores are hidden.
Basic protection
Basic protection reflects the standard anonymity prior to the release of strong protection. Basic protection only hides responses from groups that are below the anonymity threshold. It does not hide the next smallest group’s responses, which in some cases can lead to indirect identification.
An example for both protection options
Using example data, when reviewing the Engagement results by tenure, there are four tenure groups with the following number of employees responding:
- 2-4 years (2 respondents)
- 4-6 years (3 respondents)
- 6-8 years (12 respondents)
- 8+ years (5 respondents)
For this survey, the anonymity threshold has been set to three respondents required.
With basic protection enabled, the scores for the 2-4 years tenure group will not be visible as they do not meet the anonymity threshold.
With strong protection enabled, the scores for the 2-4 year tenure group will not be visible as they do not meet the anonymity threshold, and the 4-6 year tenure group will also be hidden to avoid indirect identification as it is the next smallest participant group and will therefore satisfy the anonymity threshold.
A Note About Comments
In addition to response scores, comments are also protected by anonymity. Anonymity for comments is based on the number of people who submitted a survey exceeding or equaling the anonymity threshold and not based on the number of people who wrote the comments.
Learn more about adjusting the anonymity threshold in Engagement Surveys.