Division of Surveys and Technologies (DST)

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Data collection.
DST conducts both centralized and decentralized data collection activities. Permanent, highly experienced field managers in eight regions of the nation organize the efforts of the decentralized interviewing staff. Survey production managers organize the efforts of the centralized interviewing staff. Study directors and survey managers coordinate the overall implementation process.

The central office in Ann Arbor includes more than 150 staff members who are responsible for overseeing and monitoring all data collection activities. These staff members are responsible for questionnaire development, programming, testing questionnaire application software, budgeting and scheduling projects, providing materials and supplies to the interviewing staff, and support services to the Ann Arbor staff. They carry out quality control activities including reviewing completed questionnaires and noninterview reports, conducting interview validations, and generating progress reports used in evaluating the production status of each project. The Ann Arbor office also monitors project costs and provides regular cost and production reports to clients.

The field staff includes regional field managers located throughout SRC’s primary sampling units. On average, these permanent employees of SRC have more than a decade of experience in field management, including conducting interviews, hiring, training and supervising interviewers, and implementing a wide variety of survey designs. A staff of team leaders and team leader coordinators is also employed to assist the field managers. These staff members are responsible for quality control activities in the field, as well as for validation activities and monitoring interviewers’ weekly progress and cost reports. SRC maintains an active national field staff of more than 1000 interviewers. Each newly hired interviewer is given three days of training in general interviewing techniques, as well as study-specific training for each project on which he or she works (even if the interviewer has worked for another organization). SRC interviewers are mature, well educated, experienced, and reflect the diversity of the 120 primary areas in which they work.

SRC began conducting centralized telephone surveys in 1976 and CATI surveys in 1979. The Telephone Facility has a state-of-the-art telephone system with full monitoring capabilities. Samples of interviews are monitored, and interviewers are evaluated on whether they read questions correctly, use appropriate probes, proceed at a correct pace, and accurately record the answers. The system allows monitoring of interviews from separate locations in the facility. In addition to conducting telephone surveys, the facility carries out numerous other activities that support survey efforts. Other activities include questionnaire pre-testing, respondent-interviewer behavior coding, questionnaire checking and editing, mail survey administration, focus group moderation, the recruitment of focus group participants, and data entry. The facility maintains several toll-free phone lines for respondents, including one especially for Spanish-speaking respondents.

DST also performs data entry for paper-and-pencil studies, as well as coding of open-ended questions from both paper and pencil and CAI surveys. An experienced staff of coders, supervisors, and data entry personnel design and build codes. DST staff are also responsible for converting the response data into machine-usable form and for the final checking of the coding during which errors are detected and corrected by the coders or brought to the attention of the project staff. Coding staff do precoding of complex open-ended questions (e.g., occupation) or any portion of a questionnaire that would present problems to production coding. Production coding and data entry are done using CATI/CAPI software, which facilitates working with interview data and performs a series of automatic checks designed to eliminate wild or inconsistent codes.

SRC was one of the early adopters of centralized CAI data collection, beginning in the mid 1970s with the implementation of a centralized CAI system. Since that time, SRC has become a leader in the development of CAPI and CATI systems. SRC currently supports the BLAISE software from the Central Bureau of Statistics in the Netherlands as its primary CAI software for both CATI and CAPI. SRC also conducts web surveys employing a variety of methods depending on the needs of the study. SRC has developed SURVEYTRAK, its CAPI case management system, to work with multiple interviewing systems such as Blaise, CASES, and others. SURVEYTRAK is currently in used by several nationally recognized survey organizations. SRC has proven its success at conducting very large CATI and CAPI surveys. This success is demonstrated by its collection of the multi-wave Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), with more than 10,000 interviews, and the combined Assets and Health Dynamics of the Oldest Old study (AHEAD) and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), with more than 23,000 interviews. Each of these survey instruments contains thousands of items and more than 20,000 rectangularized output variables.

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SRC Director's Office
Survey Research Center
1355 ISR Building
P.O. Box 1248
Ann Arbor, MI 48106
Phone: 734-764-8365

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