EXAMPLE 2 Computer-assisted interviewing

The days of the interviewer with a clipboard are past. Contemporary interviewers carry a laptop computer for face-to-face interviews or watch a computer screen as they carry out a telephone interview. Computer software manages the interview. The interviewer reads questions from the computer screen and uses the keyboard to enter the responses. The computer skips irrelevant items—once a respondent says that she has no children, further questions about her children never appear. The computer can check that answers to related questions are consistent with each other. It can even present questions in random order to avoid any bias due to always asking questions in the same order.

Computer software also manages the record keeping. It keeps records of who has responded and prepares a file of data from the responses. The tedious process of transferring responses from paper to computer, once a source of processing errors, has disappeared. The computer even schedules the calls in telephone surveys, taking account of the respondent’s time zone and honoring appointments made by people who were willing to respond but did not have time when first called.