Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI)

Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews(CAPI) is a face-to-face interview method where the interviewer uses a tablet, mobile phone or a computer to record answers given during the interview. There is a wide variety of CAPI software in the market which makes it easy even for someone with no programming experience to program a questionnaire for computer assisted interviews.

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• When programming a questionnaire in CAPI software, careful attention must be paid to a few things which is covered in the topic Questionnaire Programming.

Comparisons with the PAPI method

CAPI method has a few advantages over the PAPI method of data collection. The advantages are link to better data quality and management and are listed below:

• The data can be validated during the interview leading to better quality data. Along with data validation, the data is also in electronic format which cuts down on the time and effort needed to digitize paper survey data and removes mistakes made when copying the data from paper to digital format.
• Complex skips in the questionnaire can be programmed directly into the software, making the survey more efficient and accurate.
• It is also a good tool to monitor enumerators. Since, the software can record start and end time and gps location of an interview automatically, supervisors can check if the interview team did actually conduct the interview or not by comparing that data to other interviews where a supervisor was present.

While CAPI method has advantages over PAPI methods in terms of data quality and efficiency, PAPI method of surveying is still useful during qualitative surveys and situations when an extensive amount of note needs to be taken during the survey. One such situation when a PAPI interview is preferred over CAPI is during a survey pilot.

CAPI software

At DIME, we use SurveyCTO software for data collection on tablets. A lot of the resources on this page can be applied to other software as well. DIME projects are not required to use SurveyCTO and each project is free to choose the software that fits their project the best. However, the support team at DIME does not have capacity to develop substantial resources for more than one survey software.

Other CAPI software commonly used in data collection is listed in the table below:

List of other CAPI software in alphabetical order

Name	Developer	Website
Blaise	Statistics Netherlands	http://blaise.com/
CSPro	United States Census Bureau	https://www.census.gov/population/international/software/cspro/
Dooblo	Dooblo Ltd., Israel	http://www.dooblo.net/
Open Data Kit(ODK)	University of Washington's Department of Computer Science and Engineering	https://opendatakit.org/
SurveyBe	Economic Development Initiatives Limited, UK	http://surveybe.com/
SurveySolutions	The World Bank	https://solutions.worldbank.org/

Choosing a CAPI software for your needs

When choosing a CAPI software, you should keep a few things in mind to make sure that you choose the best one for your project:

• Data Capture = Does the CAPI Software you're going to choose capture all forms of data that you need i.e. text, numbers, pictures, audio, etc? Does it have the language support that you need to conduct multilingual surveys or record multilingual answers ?
• Questionnaire Navigation = Is it easy to navigate through the questionnaire in the software? Can you perform the skips and loops that you need to do in your survey in the software ?
• Data Quality Control = Does the CAPI software provide ways of controlling the quality of data(values within certain range, values with a required character, values without a certain character, etc)?
• Data Management = Is the data output file from the CAPI Software compatible with the statistical tool you use to analyze datasets?
• Case Management = How easy does the software make for management of tasks for various people in the hierarchy(team leaders, enumerators, etc) during a survey ?

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This article is part of the topic Preparing for Data Collection

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