Experiences of Usage of Blaise in CATI surveys
Stefania Macchia & Manuela Murgia ; ISTAT, Italy
A lot of surveys in Istat are carried out with CATI technique and for a great number of them a strategy has been
defined aimed at improving the quality of data. This strategy consists in relying on private companies only for the
call centre and the selection of interviewers and in providing them with the entire software procedure to be used for
the data capturing phase, which is based on the Blaise system.
Having adopted this strategy with success for more than three years made us cope with different requirements
expressed by each survey that we solved either exploiting the potentialities of Blaise or integrating the software
procedure with other software packages.
Some of these solutions turned to constitute standard tools in our procedures, some others needed to be used
only for particular purposes, so we did not develop standard functions, but we identified the software packages to
be used for them, while for other requirements, we would like to have at disposal some specific functions included
in the Blaise system. The last ones are those requirements which, even if are not common to all the surveys, are
typical of a well identified subset of them and would require a big programming effort to be integrated in a software
procedure.
With the purpose of clarifying what will be widely described in the paper, we refer, for instance, to the requirements
which are common to all the CATI surveys. For them, we standardised the solutions in order to be easily adapted
to each situation. They concern:
• the production of a certain number of reports to monitor daily the interviewing phase both from the qualitative
and the quantitative point of view,
• a standard procedure for the electronic transmission of data (interviews and reports) from the external
companies to Istat, which guarantees all the security requirements,
• a function which allows the display on the screen, during all the interview, of the called telephone number and
name of the person,
• etc.
Other requirements are proper of certain surveys. For this kind of subjects, as already said, we did not develop
standard procedures, but we identified the software tools to be used. For instance, for two surveys on individuals
we carried out with Blaise, the coding of Occupation during the interview was a particularly delicate activity, so we
used the Blaise assisted coding function, building a very reach coding dictionary (list of descriptions with
correspondent codes) and we monitored the performances of interviewers on this subject through the usage of
control charts developed with the SAS QC software.
Other needs are recurrent in a lot of surveys, even if not in all of them. For instance, the most important
requirement is that in household surveys it is often necessary to contact more than one member of the household
to get the interview and to assign a dial result to those members who are contacted but do not wish to co-operate
or are not eligible. It has been really hard to implement this function, because it is in contrast with the logic of the
Blaise schedulator, and the software solution developed is not immediately portable to other surveys, so we think it
would be better to have this potentiality directly provided by Blaise.
Other particular aspects will be described in the paper, dwelling upon the problems encountered and the results
obtained in the different surveys.
| Contact: murgia@istat.it |