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Asking Questions - The Definitive Guide To Questionnaire Design ...

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QUESTIONNAIRES FROM START TO FINISH 321<br />

you should be sure to leave enough time in the schedule for the second<br />

pilot test.<br />

It is difficult to make any general recommendations about the<br />

optimal time to begin programming questionnaires into your CAPI<br />

or CATI system if you are using computer-assisted interviewing. Setting<br />

up complex questionnaires with many skip instructions takes<br />

considerable time and usually involves specialists. <strong>The</strong>refore you<br />

should start setting up the questionnaire after you have a draft<br />

you are fairly satisfied with and before you have finished all of the<br />

pretesting and revisions. When all the revisions have been completed,<br />

it will then be necessary to revise the computer program to<br />

make sure all revisions have been incorporated into the CAPI or<br />

CATI program. It will also be necessary to check the skip instructions<br />

to make sure that any contingencies among questions that<br />

were altered in the revisions are also altered in the final program. Be<br />

sure to allow yourself enough time to ensure that the revised programs<br />

work correctly.<br />

Last-Minute Revisions and Post-Interview Evaluations<br />

After the final pilot test, it is unlikely many serious problems will<br />

remain. Nevertheless, even at this stage, a problem may arise that<br />

did not come up during pretesting. If such a problem surfaces during<br />

the writing of the final interviewer instructions, you can still<br />

revise the questionnaire. Sometimes, if the questionnaire has already<br />

been printed, you may need to supplement the questionnaire<br />

with an insert sheet. Such inserts should be used only for the most<br />

serious situations, since they may create new problems of their own.<br />

You can handle minor problems that surface during the actual interviewer<br />

training or interview by revising or expanding interviewer<br />

instructions or by ignoring the problems and editing or treating the<br />

data as missing during the analysis.<br />

After the interviewing is completed and the data are collected,<br />

it is always useful to analyze interviewer reports of problems and to

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