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In an age of technological advances everywhere, it might seem blasphemous to suggest that a telephone survey be administered in any way other than CATI (Computer Aided Telephone Interviewing). After all, it has the advantages of skip pattern logic, controls for out of range values in the answers that are recorded, and it can refer to previous answers given or to database information already known about a respondent.
In most instances, there is no good argument for administering a complex telephone survey in any way other than by CATI. Fully 90% of all quantitative telephone studies we conduct at Q & A are done via CATI. However, there are times when a paper and pencil administered survey has its advantages.
No Lead Time
Time is often of the essence (who am I kidding?). Time is always of the essence in our business, but if you must both design a survey and be in field on the same day, chances are you won't have time to program. This leads us to the first advantage of a paper and pencil survey - no lead-time requirements.
Less Expensive
CATI programming is a fixed cost element in project pricing. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether you are going to complete one interview or 1001, the program takes just as long to write. If the total number of surveys to complete over the life of the project is relatively small, it may be advantageous to administer the survey via paper and pencil. The modest costs of a data entry program and the data entry, itself, are usually lower than the costs of CATI programming until fixed cost efficiencies are in effect, somewhere around 200 to 300 interviews. This is the second advantage of a paper and pencil survey: lower costs on smaller projects.
Data Integrity
But what about the accuracy of the data? Isn't manual data entry vulnerable to input errors? According to Q & A Data Entry Supervisor Elena Gonzales, that all depends.
"For a relatively basic survey with few, if any, challenging skip patterns, it comes down to the confidence of a person hired for their interviewing skills inputting the answer correctly into a CATI system compared to a person hired for their data entry skills inputting the data from paper. Considering the abilities of data entry programs to control for out of range values and skip patterns and to perform keystroke verification, an argument could be made that the cleaner data in this scenario is that of paper and pencil."
Granted, the paper and pencil versus CATI survey administration quandary is hardly fodder for heated debate. Nor is it likely that you will find this a topic of conversation at the next cocktail party you attend. But it is important to know that there is a time and a place for paper and pencil in telephone survey administration. You just need to know when to get the lead out.
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