Hardwick Research - Telephone Surveys

Additional Information on Telephone Surveys
Telephone surveys can be conducted "blind" or respondents can be told who is sponsoring the research.

Most telephone interviews are conducted using a Computer Aided Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system. The computer screen displays the questions to be asked in sequence and the interviewer enters the responses directly into the computer. Any survey skip patterns are automatically implemented by the computer.

Prior to conducting the telephone survey, a pre-test is conducted with actual qualified respondents. The pre-test provides an opportunity for a final evaluation of the questionnaire prior to starting the interviews. Any last minute changes can be made to ensure that the questions are understood by the respondents and that the information obtained meets the study's objectives. Additionally the length of the survey is also tested. In most situations, a telephone survey should be less than fifteen minutes in length.

To ensure quality control, a monitoring system is attached to each telephone line at the central telephone facility and is used throughout the study. This monitoring system allows the supervisors to listen to the actual telephone interviews, as they are occurring, to ensure that the surveys are being conducted correctly. This system also allows for clients to call from any location and listen to the actual telephone interviews being conducted.

In order to analyze the responses obtained during the telephone survey, a cross-tabulated database of the results is created. Open-ended questions are coded (where responses that were shared by at least five percent of respondents are assigned a code number for easier tabulation) and included in the database. This cross-tabulated database provides the total results as well as a break out by market segment (i.e.; age, income, gender). A copy of this cross-tabulated database is provided to the client and used in analysis of the study's results.