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Computer-Assisted Personal Interviews (CAPI)

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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.

Read First

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

When to use CAPI surveys

CAPI method has advantages and disadvantages when compared with the PAPI method of data collection. The advantages of the CAPI method are listed as follows:

  • 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.

Even though CAPI surveys have benefits in terms of the data quality and management, PAPI methods are very useful in certain situations :

  • PAPI surveys are especially useful in interviews where a lot of comments/information needs to be taken. For example - qualitative surveys, survey pilot, etc
  • PAPI surveys provide a hard copy backup. CAPI data gets corrupted before it can be uploaded to a server, it is lost for ever.
  • PAPI surveys are useful in areas without good electricity or data connectivity. While this can be worked using battery packs and offline data storage during CAPI surveys, in some remote parts of the world, it is easier just to do a PAPI survey.
  • PAPI surveys are safer to conduct in crime-ridden areas as tablets/phone can be an easy target for thieves.
  • Some respondents are not comfortable during CAPI surveys due to concerns due to spying.
  • CAPI surveys require technologically competent enumerators or longer training periods for enumerators in cases which might be a problem in surveys done in emergency situations.

All these points should be carefully considered before deciding on the method of interview done for the survey.

CAPI Software

At DIME, we use SurveyCTO software for data collection on tablets. 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 ?

Programming

For programming a survey for CAPI interviews, please read the page on questionnaire programming.

Back to Parent

This article is part of the topic Preparing for Data Collection

Additional Resources

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