Survey participants often feel reluctant to share their true experience because they are worried about potential retaliation in case their responses are identified (e.g., data leakage). This is especially the case for sensitive survey questions such as those asking about sexual harassment in the workplace. As a result, survey administrators (e.g., company management, researchers) often get inaccurate representation of the reality, which makes it hard to devise an appropriate course of action.
Safely Report is a survey web application that can provide plausible deniability to survey respondents by recording survey responses with noise. For instance, when asking a worker whether they have been harassed by a manager, the application can be set up to record the answer "yes" with a probability of 30% even if the worker responds "no". This makes it nearly impossible to correctly identify which responses (of all those recorded "yes") are truthful reports — even if the survey results are leaked. Yet, the survey designer can still well estimate the proportion and other statistics of truthful reports because they know the rate of noise injection. Consequently, survey participants feel more safe and become more willing to share their true experience, which has been confirmed by a relevant study.
The easiest way to try out safely-report is through running a Docker container with sample data.
If you do not have Docker installed, please follow instructions
here to set it up.
Once Docker is available, run:
docker run -p 80:80 princetonddss/safely-report sh -c "cp .env.dev .env && sh docker-entrypoint.sh"Then, visit http://0.0.0.0:80 to access the application (use devpassword to sign in as admin).
If you want to learn more about Safely Report, please check out the official project documentation.
The software is free to use under the MIT License. Please use the following DOI for citation: