Telephone Surveys

Systems and Techniques

Most professional telephone surveys are conducted using a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system, which allows, among other things, interviewers to enter respondent information directly into the computer. Questions in CATI can be designed to appear for telephone interviewers one at a time or in blocks of similar questions. This helps to promote a similar interviewing experience for all respondents and limits possible confusion among telephone interviewers. CATI systems also allow skip patterns, in which one or more questions are skipped depending on the answers given to previous questions, and other programming such as randomly rotating the order of response options in order to help counterbalance the effect on respondent answers based on the order in which they hear the answer choices.

To further reduce survey error, CATI systems allow for intensive monitoring of interviewers. Interviewers can be monitored for productivity, data quality, and data falsification, among other things. Supervisors are able to monitor interviewers in real time from remote locations. CATI can also improve interviewer productivity by allowing for automatic scheduling of callbacks. This allows interviewers to set up specifie times to call back a respondent (often based on a specific respondent request), which helps to increase response rates and productivity.

One of the major benefits of using a CATI system is the ability to easily implement random-digit dialing. This technique is used often in telephone surveys to access a random selection of households within [Page 885]a target population. Random-digit dialing works by allowing area codes and telephone prefixes to be selected in a representative fashion and the remaining digits to be randomly generated by computer. By purposely selecting specifie area codes, it is possible to geographically target the geopolitical areas of interest (although the accuracy with which this can be accomplished has decreased considerably due to the effects of number portability and cell phone only households that no longer live in the geopolitical area in which their cell phone was purchased). By specifying telephone prefixes in addition to area codes, many ineligible numbers can be eliminated from the sample even before they are called. Such banks of telephone numbers often include businesses, which many times have different prefixes than do residential numbers. Eliminating these numbers from a sample allows for an increase in overall productivity, as interviewers do not need to spend time calling them.

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