Products
Contact Support Additional Learning Monthly Product Updates
Menu

Forsta Survey Designer Support

All the topics, resources needed for Forsta Survey Designer.

CATI Overview

  • Last updated:

Articles in this section

In this article

    CATI is the abbreviation for Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing. This is an integrated computer system for data collection that manages all the day-to-day activities of a telephone interviewing call center.

    Under Mode and key options (go to Survey Settings for more information), when the CATI option is selected, the CATI - Telephone settings are available under the More settings link.

    Figure 1 - -The CATI - Telephone settings

    • The Dial mode is the method used to dial the telephone numbers. The mode selected will depend on the dialing system used by the call canter that will be using the survey. The options are:
    • Manual - the interviewer is allocated a telephone number by the CATI system, and manually dials the number on their telephone.
    • Preview - the CATI system presents the telephone number on the interviewer's display, and the interviewer clicks, for example, "OK" when he/she is ready to start the interview. The CATI system then dials the number and connects the line to the interviewer's telephone.
    • Automatic - the CATI system dials the next number in its sample list automatically as soon as it registers that the interviewer is finished with the previous interview.
    • Predictive - when the dialer dials a telephone number, in a large proportion of cases the line may be engaged, the prospective respondent may not answer the phone, the number may be a fax machine etc. If the dialer were to dial a number and wait for a reply before trying the next, a lot of time will be wasted. The dialer will therefore dial several numbers simultaneously and pass the first answered line to the first available interviewer. This can increase productivity for the call center, but can result in a lot of prospective respondents receiving "nuisance calls" - where their phone rings, they answer it but there is no-one on the other end. Careful adjustment of the dialing system is therefore necessary to keep the percentage of nuisance calls to a minimum. A large number of dialing systems are available on the market. For further information on the dialer your CATI system is using, refer to the technical information provided by your dialer supplier or the internal team responsible for your CATI/dialer infrastructure.

    Note: Changes to the Dial mode are only effective after the survey is re-launched, and will only be applied to the dialer once the survey is closed/shutdown and then re-opened in the CATI Supervisor.

    • Allow live call monitoring - if this option is not selected, then it will only be possible to monitor interviews after the survey script function EnableLiveMonitoring() has been executed.
    • Enable whole interview audio recording - if a dialer is used for the call, when this setting is enabled the audio for all interviews carried out in this survey will be recorded and available for playback from the call management dialog. If screen recording is also enabled, the interviews can be replayed with both screen and voice from the 'Recorded Interviews' tab in the CATI supervisor.
    • Automatically start screen recording... - (default - not selected) if a dialer is used for the call, when this setting is enabled, the screen for all interviews carried out in this survey will be recorded and available to view from the 'Recorded Interviews' tab in the CATI supervisor. If audio recording is also enabled, the interviews can be replayed with both screen and voice from the 'Recorded Interviews' tab in the CATI supervisor. If this option is not selected, then screen recording will only begin after the survey script function StartScreenRecording() has been executed
    • Enable open-end reviewing by interviewers - when a survey contains Open Text fields, after the interview is completed the interviewer may need to go back through the questions and review/edit the text he/she has written. When this box is checked, all Open Text fields in the survey will be made available on the interviewer's display after the interview is completed.
    • Display answer codes in survey - CATI interviewing supports the use of the keyboard for selecting answer options. Check this box if you wish the interviewers to be able to see the codes. The interviewer can then type the code value or text into the field and press Enter to "select" the answer option.
    • Enable scheduling for Web interviewing - if this box is checked, if a web interview finishes with a predefined status then the CATI scheduling rules will be invoked. Typical scenarios where this may be invoked are as follows:
    • A Multimode interview that is started in CATI but completed via Web because when the email is sent to the respondent during the CATI interview an appointment is created for some point in the future (for example 1 week). If the respondent later completes the survey via the Web, the appointment is removed. If they do not complete it then the appointment will remain valid and will need to be followed up by the interviewer.
    • A Web survey that has an option to have an interviewer call the respondent back. After the respondent requests this, the system will create a call for that respondent in its call queue. This is done via the scheduling rules.
    • Enable automatic removal of calls from numbers in telephone blacklist - if this box is checked, if the company maintains a telephone blacklist (numbers for respondents who have indicated they do not wish to be contacted), then any numbers on the blacklist will be removed automatically from the calling list.
    • Enable dynamic creation of new respondents... - check to allow the interviewer to create respondent records.

    Note: For CATI surveys, you can adjust the user interface of a test version of the survey so it is easily distinguishable from the production version.

    Creating a Test Version of a CATI Survey

    You may wish to create a duplicate version of a CATI survey so you can test it or practice working on it before you start to collect real data in the live production survey. In these cases a common approach is to add words such as ‘Test’ or ‘Live’ into the name of the survey. However both the test and the production versions will look almost identical, so a potential danger is that the interviewer may accidentally enter test data into the production survey or production data into the test version. To help avoid possible confusion, you can create a much more visible distinction to the CATI interviewer interface for surveys deployed as test surveys. By simply including Test Mode symbol will be included in the toolbar.

    Figure 2 - Example of a CATI survey in Test mode

    To return the user interface to its normal look, delete the #Test text from the survey name and save the changes (go to Survey Overview for more information).