Academic literature on the topic 'Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI)'

Controlling field interview quality is a major challenge in survey research. Even in high-quality surveys, interviewers often make mistakes that ultimately result in added error in results, including visiting the wrong locations, skipping questions or entire pages, failing to read the complete wording of the questions, or even committing fraud while filling out responses. Survey research conducted in developing countries has to deal with these problems more frequently than research conducted in advanced industrial countries. Computer assisted personal interview (CAPI) systems provide an ideal

The integration of computing into survey research and focus groups in research and practice in public administration and related fields is the focus of this chapter. Coverage applies to other social science disciplines as well. This chapter reviews uses of computers in computer-assisted information collection (CASIC), computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI), and transferring survey research methods onto the Web. A second portion of the chapter gives special attention to continuous audience response technology (CART). An example of a citizen survey focused on growth issues combined with a focus group dealing with the same topic in Cary, North Carolina, is also discussed.

Surveys—data collection based on standardized questionnaires— started with censuses thousands of years ago. However, it was only in the 1930s, following some breakthrough developments in applied statistics, that the sample survey data collection approach was widely acknowledged. The possibility of inferring about the total population from samples of 300 or 1,000 units radically expanded the potential of survey data collection. In addition to sampling, survey data collection procedures also rely on a proper measurement instrument (i.e., a survey questionnaire) as well as effective administrative and managerial activities. Since the 1930s, opinion polling has become a major tool of democratic development (Gallup & Rae, 1968). Official statistics have recognized the enormous potential of survey data collection for the fast estimation of crops, industry outputs, unemployment, and so forth. Further, the marketing and media industries obtained a tool to effectively measure the characteristics of their target groups. The survey industry has therefore become an established activity with its own associations (e.g., ESOMAR, AAPOR), codes of conduct, publications, conferences, professional profiles, and large multinational companies generating annual revenues worth billions of dollars (e.g., A.C. Nielsen). Surveys were traditionally performed as personal interviews, over the telephone or in the form of selfadministrated questionnaires. Information-communication technology (ICT) developments introduced radical changes to the survey data collection processes, particularly because the core of this activity is manipulation with the information itself. The early implementations of ICT in survey data collection are linked to computer developments. Mass computerization started with the emerging PC in the 1980s and enabled computer-assisted survey information collection (CASIC), firstly with the introductionn of computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI). In the late 1980s, portable computers started to be used with face-to-face interview data collection, leading to computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). When personal computers started to become the mainstream, computerized self-administered questionnaires (CSAQ) were implemented in various forms. The last crucial milestone came in the 1990s with the rise of the Internet, which enabled e-mail and Web-based types of CSAQ. This started a new stream of ICT development which is radically transforming the entire survey industry. Internet-based data collection will soon become the mainstream survey mode. Studies for 2005 projected that market research organizations worldwide would generate over a billion dollars in revenue on the basis of Internet surveys (Terhanian & Bremer, 2005). In addition, about 40% of research work in the USA in 2003-2004 was conducted on the Internet (E-consultancy, 2004).

An increasing number of longitudinal studies worldwide cover societal change over decades. The fieldwork of these panel surveys experienced notable technological advancements and often switched modes of data collection over time. A large body of literature documents that the mode of data collection matters for respondent behaviour. However, empirical evidence of mode effects on estimates of reliability and validity is surprisingly scarce. This chapter proposes to adapt the experimental multitrait–multimethod (MTMM) approach to observational data. For this purpose, we use the longitudinal data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), an annual panel study started in 1984 with interviewer-administered paper-and-pencil interviews and nowadays additionally using computer-assisted personal interviewing as well as self-administered questionnaires, both mailed and web-based. While mode changes in the SOEP are not randomly assigned to respondents, we augment our approach by propensity score weighting to reduce selection bias in estimates of mode effects. Our analysis suggests moderate but statistically significant differences in reliability and validity estimates between modes of data collection.