Call Sheet

A call sheet is a record-keeping form that is used by telephone survey interviewers to keep track of information related to the calls they make to reach survey respondents. As paper-and-pencil interviewing (PAPI) was replaced by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), these call sheets moved from being printed on paper to being displayed on the interviewer's computer monitor. The fact that they are named “call sheets” refers to the days when thousands of such call sheets (each one was a piece of paper) were used to control sampling for a single telephone survey.

The information that is recorded on a call sheet—also called “paradata”—captures the history of the various call attempts that are made to a sampled telephone number. Typically these forms are laid out in matrix format, with the rows being the call attempts and the columns being the information recorded about each call. For each call attempt, the information includes (a) the date; (b) the time of day; (c) the outcome of the call (disposition), for example, ring-no answer, busy, disconnected, completed interview, and so on; and (d) any notes the interviewer may write about the call attempt that would help a subsequent interviewer and/or a supervisor who is controlling the sample, for example, “The respondent is named Virginia and she is only home during daytime hours.” Since most telephone interviews are not completed on the first calling attempt, the information that interviewers record about what occurred on previous call attempts is invaluable to help process the sample further and effectively.

It is through the use of the call outcome information recorded on the call sheet—and described in detail in the American Association for Public Opinion Research's Standard Definitions—that the sample is managed. In the days when PAPI surveys were routinely conducted and the call sheets were printed on paper, supervisory personnel had to sort the call sheets manually in real time while interviewing was ongoing. When a questionnaire was completed, the interviewer manually stapled the call sheet to the top of the questionnaire and then the supervisor removed that case from further data collection attempts. For call sheets that did not lead to completed interviews but also did not reach another final disposition (e.g. disconnected or place of business), the supervisor followed a priori “calling rules” to decide when next to recycle a call sheet for an interviewer to try dialing it again. With the shift to CATI and computer control of the sampling pool (i.e. the set of numbers being dialed) all this processing of the information recorded on call sheets has been computerized. The CATI software serves up the call sheet on the interviewer's monitor at the end of the call for pertinent information to be entered. That information drives other logic in the CATI software that determines whether, and when, to serve up the telephone number next to an interviewer. The information captured on the call sheet is used for many other purposes after the survey ends, including helping to create interviewer performance metrics and calculating survey response rates.

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