Control Sheet

A control sheet, also called a “case control form,” is used by interviewers in in-person (face-to-face) surveys to record information about the contact attempts they make with households or persons who have been sampled.

Similar in purpose to the call sheet used by telephone interviewers, the control sheet captures key paradata about each contact attempt an interviewer makes with the household or person. This includes (a) the date of the contact attempt, (b) the time of day of the contact attempt, (c) the outcome (disposition) of the contact attempt, and (d) any additional information that is pertinent about the effort to make contact (e.g. the name of the designated respondent if she or he is not home at the time the attempt is made and the best time to recontact her or him).

The information recorded on control sheets serves several important purposes. First, it allows the interviewers and supervisory field staff to better control the processing of the sample according to the a priori contact rules that have been established by the researchers. For example, these rules set guidelines about how many times a person or household can be contacted within a week's period; how many of these contacts should be during the day on weekdays, in the evening hours of weekdays, or on weekends; and how many days must elapse between a first refusal and an attempt to convert the refusal. The control sheet is the mechanism that brings order to the systematic processing of the sample. Second, the information on the control sheet about previous contact attempts allows an interviewer to be better prepared to gain a completed interview the next time she or he tries to contact the household. Third, the information on the control sheet can be used by supervisory staff in their ongoing and annual evaluations of the performance of individual interviewers, teams of interviewers, and/or the interviewing staff as a whole. Fourth, the information on the control sheet can be analyzed by the researchers to investigate ways to improve the cost-effectiveness of future interviewing (e.g. studying the optimal time lapse between a first refusal and a successful conversion attempt).