Computer Assisted Personal Interview

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From computer-assisted personal interviewing ( CAPI ; German  computer-assisted personal interviewing ) is when an interviewer with a notebook computer on which the questionnaire program runs, the visits interviewee and then together passes with it the questionnaire on the screen. From a technical point of view, it makes no difference whether the interviewer asks the questions and enters the answers or whether the person being interviewed looks at the screen and uses the keyboard. However, the presence of an interviewer can lead to a distortion of the results due to, for example, the effect of social desirability.

Most CAPI systems are variants or descendants of CATI systems . The following system components can be distinguished:

  • The programming environment for the questionnaire and the runtime system for its execution in the interview: These system parts are usually identical to those for the CATI application, because it makes no difference whether the computer is in the telephone studio or on a table between the two Interviewer and the interviewer.
  • Address management: While the addresses of a project are managed centrally in CATI systems, in CAPI systems, for example, the address inventory must be divided into packages in advance according to regional criteria, which are then passed on to different interviewers. The address management supports the distribution of addresses, their dispatch to the interviewer (usually by means of file transfer or as e-mail file attachments), the regular, e.g. B. daily retransmission of the addresses with the respective completion status and their merging and evaluation in the central project management. The data collected will be sent together with the addresses during the retransmission.
  • Project statistics: The key figures for the status of the various projects are prepared in table and chart form.
  • Language support: This component supports the transfer of the questionnaire into another survey language.

The components for project statistics and language support are often identical in CATI, CAPI and also in web-based survey systems .