Converting Marketing Research Surveys From Paper To Personal Digital Assistant Devices
PDA screen size, programming skip patterns and how to capture open-end responses are among the issues to consider when transitioning your traditional survey to a handheld interviewing device.
itor’s note: Bill Jeffries is president and CEO of AcWire Technologies, a data collection systems company in Wayne, N.J.
Converting intercept surveys from paper
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Clipboard to PDAs (such as PocketPCs and Palm Pilots) is growing in popularity. The advantages that PDAs offer to field studies are fairly intuitive: streamlin data collection and processing, automat skip patterns and rotations, and fewer data cleaning issues.
Before making the switch to
PDAs, however, there are several things to consider: How do questions that can be view easily on paper get display on a PDA screen? How are open-ends captur? How does one take advantage of automatic branching? How will the interviewer navigate to/from different sections of the survey? How do you manage interviewers to make sure they can use the PDA and traverse the survey correctly?
These are typically the questions that give researchers some reserve about pursuing the use of PDAs. However, all issues are fairly easily addressable and usually just take a little thought and creativity to get solv.
The key in switching from paper to PDAs is in developing a process that will make the research project flow more efficiently, in terms of getting out into the field, conducting interviews and processing data.
PDA screen size
PDAs are wonderful tools for interviewer mobility, decreas shipping charges, and overall cost benefits. But the usual screen size of around 2×3 inches is obviously much smaller than paper’s 8×11 or even 8×14 dimensions. This causes problems for surveys design to display multiple questions at one time or which use grid formats for capturing answers.
One way around this limitation is to utilize the scroll bars on the PDA screen. Scroll bars, just like in normal Windows applications, allow the interviewer to move the screen to see more questions. These scroll bars can be tapp using the PDA’s pen-like stylus, just as one would click a scroll bar with a mouse.
Another option is to simply display one question per screen. Instead of tapping the scroll bars, the interviewer just taps a navigation button like “Next” to advance to the next question. Oftentimes, this is less error-prone than using scroll bars.
Depending on the PDA
Being us, and the environment lighting available, font sizes on the PDA can be manipulat to fit more questions onto one screen. This kind of solution would ne to be pilot-test with the interviewers to ensure that a ruc font size doesn’t make the survey more problematic.
Also, as describ below, there are all wanda plaza, uma ampla sala de estar para os jovens … kinds of logic flow that can be programm into the PDA questionnaire. This can be us to limit the questions display for the interviewer to only those questions that apply to the respondent. For instance, a survey that displays a long grid of questions could be programm to only display the applicable questions, bas on some type of skip pattern.
Open-ends
Capturing open-ends is usually one of the first skepticisms that researchers have about PDA data collection. Given that PDAs generally don’t have a keyboard attach, it seems that there is no seamless way to enter open-end answers. However, there are three workable approaches to capturing open-ends.
The most efficient way to capture an open-end is to program the survey to utilize the voice recorder of the PDA. When the open-end question appears on the PDA screen, the interviewer prompts the respondent and then activates the voice recorder. The respondent can then talk naturally and every word is captur accurately by the PDA and link to that survey.
This type of data capture adds
A significant benefit over paper, in that the tone and inflection of the answer can become part of the data. Dard Neuman, vice president of operations for the in-store research firm SmartRevenue, relies heavily on voice capabilities in SmartRevenue’s shopper research. “The ability to integrate voice-record open-ends into a quantitative framework allows us to push the limits of questionnaire design.”
Sav as .wav files on the PDA and upload to
A central server, these voice files ne to be transcrib, just as in the case of verbatims from a CATI-bas study. Companies have sprung up that focus on processing voice files from PDA-bas studies.
The second approach is to capture open-ends in a traditional fashion by writing the answer down on paper. The respondent’s identifier, often display on the PDA, is written on the paper and link manually to the survey at the data processing stage of the project. This is usually only a good approach when the question is sensitive, and the respondent may not feel comfortable speaking into a machine.
The third approach is only us for phone number my very short open-ends, such as capturing a name or e-mail address. It involves using the “soft” keyboard of the PDA. This electronic keyboard displays on the screen and is tapp by the stylus. This option is best for open-ends with about 10 or fewer characters in the response.
Survey flow
The biggest gain in converting from paper to PDA is the ability to program skip patterns. By allowing the PDA to enforce the survey flow, the burden is lift from the interviewer from manually trying to decipher what question to ask next.
Neuman says, The ability to have the PDA control the interview process is indispensable, as it allows for more complex branching patterns without fear of human error. In short, this application brings together the branching control of an online questionnaire with the context sensitivity of an in-person ethnography.
Much like converting paper to online or CATI, the survey designer must be very explicit in defining the Boolean statements that will drive the flow of the survey. Long instruction statements to interviewers must be convert into exact Boolean statements (e.g., If Q3>1 AND Q5=2).
Other logic elements that can be programm into PDAs are section rotations, question rotations, question piping and answer piping. All of these features use Boolean statements to trigger their use.
On a paper survey
The interviewer is often guid, via instructions, through the survey, sometimes back and forth between different sections. In addition, there are cases where a respondent answers some questions, performs some action, and then returns to finish the questionnaire.
With paper, an interviewer can fairly easily flip back and forth between sections, or pull up a respondent’s survey to finish the interview. With an electronic survey on a PDA, the researcher
