Last updated: 23 May 2026. This page describes the privacy design of Q Down Under. Individual studies may include additional ethics-approved participant information and consent wording.
Q Down Under is a research platform for Q methodology. It supports concourse and Q-sample development, online Q-sort collection, analysis, and export. The platform is designed for academic and research use.
For each study, the researcher who creates and administers that study is responsible for the study content, participant information, ethics approval, retention period, and handling of participant withdrawal requests. Q Down Under provides the technical infrastructure and researcher-level isolation tools.
Depending on study setup, Q Down Under may store study information, Q statements, pre-sort and post-sort answers, Q-sort placements, timestamps, participant codes, researcher-assigned IDs, analysis settings, saved analyses, concourse records, and export/audit metadata. Participants are identified in the app by generated participant codes unless a researcher deliberately adds other identifiers in questions or researcher-assigned IDs.
Researcher accounts can access only their own studies through the application. The owner account can manage researcher accounts but is blocked in the application from opening or exporting individual researchers' study data. Infrastructure administrators with direct database-console access may technically have broader access, as is normal with hosted research infrastructure, and should act only under appropriate governance or institutional authority.
The app is hosted on Vercel and stores structured data in Supabase. Connections use HTTPS. Researcher authentication uses secure session cookies. The application includes route-level ownership checks and database-level row-level-security preparation.
Q Down Under (QDU) stores study and participant data using Supabase cloud infrastructure in the region configured by the platform administrator. Researchers are responsible for ensuring that the selected hosting region complies with their institutional ethics, privacy, and data-protection requirements, including GDPR where applicable.
Researchers should provide study-specific information about withdrawal, retention, and contact details in the consent text. Q Down Under includes tools for deleting participant records and purging incomplete participant records when needed for ethics or privacy reasons.
Researchers can record a study-level retention date and notes. Deletion tools are available for participant records and complete study datasets. Exported files are controlled by the researcher who downloads them and are not automatically deleted by Q Down Under.
Q Down Under uses essential session cookies for researcher login and local browser storage for interface preferences such as daylight/dark mode. The app does not require advertising or analytics cookies.
For a participant request, contact the researcher named in the study information/consent text. For platform questions, contact the Q Down Under administrator.