SurveyToGo: How To Make Safe Changes to a Production Survey

Guide to making safe production survey changes—lists safe vs. risky changes (adding questions, renaming variables, changing coding) and general recommendations.

août 4, 2026
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How To Make Safe Changes to a Production Survey

Overview

Modifying a survey that is already in production requires careful planning. Certain changes are safe and will not affect previously collected data, while others may alter the survey structure and impact existing interviews or exported data.

This guide outlines the types of changes that can be made safely without affecting data that has already been collected.

Safe Changes

The following changes can generally be made safely in a production survey:

Add New Questions

You can add new questions to the survey at any time.

Previously completed interviews will not contain data for the new questions, while interviews completed after the change will include the new fields.

Add New Answers or Topics

You can safely add new answer options or topics to an existing question.

Use either the Add button or the Multi-Add feature to append new answers.

Do not delete the existing answer list and recreate it. Removing and re-adding answers changes their internal identifiers and is not considered a safe modification.

Change Question Text

You can safely modify the body text of a question.

Changing the displayed text does not affect previously collected data.

Change Answer or Topic Text

You can safely edit the text of an existing answer or topic.

To edit the text, select the answer or topic and press F2, or use the available edit option.

Do not delete an answer or topic and create a new one with the same text. If answers or topics need to be removed, follow the recommended procedure described later in this guide.

Enable or Disable Quality Control Flags

Adding or removing Quality Control Flags is safe.

These changes do not affect previously collected data, and interviews that were already flagged will retain their existing quality control flags.

Enable or Disable Survey Properties

Enabling or disabling Survey Properties is generally safe and does not affect data that has already been collected.

However, some survey properties may change how the data is displayed or exported. For example, they can affect:

How topic variables are exported.
Whether custom data fields are displayed in the Operations Console.
Other presentation or export-related settings.

Review the impact of each property before enabling or disabling it in a production survey.

Changes That Are Not Recommended

The following changes are not recommended in a production survey, as they can affect previously collected data or the survey structure.

Change a Question Type

Do not change the type of an existing question in a production survey.

Instead:

Create a new question with the required question type.
Prevent the original question from being displayed by either:
- Setting its Entrance Rule to false, or
- Setting Hidden From Surveyor to True on the question's Advanced tab.

Remove Questions

We recommend not removing questions from a production survey.

Instead, hide the question by:

Setting its Entrance Rule to false, or
Setting Hidden From Surveyor to True on the Advanced tab.

Removing a question permanently removes its definition from the survey, which means data collected for that question in existing interviews will no longer be available.

Remove Answers or Topics

We recommend not removing answer options or topics.

Instead, hide them by using the following functions in the question's Start Script:

SetAnswerVisible()
SetTopicVisible()

If an answer or topic is removed, existing interviews that contain data for that answer or topic may lose the associated data. Hiding answers or topics preserves the existing variable names, coding, and previously collected data.

After Making Changes

Whenever you modify a production survey, interviewers must synchronize their devices to download the latest survey version. Otherwise, they will continue collecting data using the previous version of the survey.

You can verify the survey version in:

The Survey Info tab in SurveyToGo Studio.
The survey selection screen in the SurveyToGo data collection application.

Important: After making any changes to a production survey, thoroughly review and test the survey script to ensure the updated logic and routing behave as expected.

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