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Situation
Battelle is a major not–for–profit research foundation comprising 7,500 researchers and scientists and handling nearly $1 billion in research and technology development projects for government and commercial organizations throughout the United States. The Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation (CPHRE) is a division of Batelle which operates from six centers in the country, four of which carry out surveys on the phone, face–to–face and via mail.
Challenge
Facing a decline in respondent participation, The Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation (CPHRE), needed a solution to keep its most valuable resource engaged in its survey research efforts.
Solution
To provide more options for its respondents to participate in research studies, CPHRE is adding to its existing capabilities by implementing solutions for multi–modal research. Tools from IBM SPSS Data Collection platform are helping streamline its survey design efforts, and add web and paper based research to its capabilities.
Giving Respondents the Power of Choice
Multi–modal interviewing is "the future of survey research", according to Bill Grady, health research leader for the Centers for Public Health Research and Evaluation (CPHRE) where he is currently introducing mrPaper and mrInterview to CPHRE's survey division. Grady explained: "Most of our work is with CATI. But people are increasingly reluctant to participate, so response rates are dropping. We are extremely interested in doing multi–mode surveys as a way to improve participation rates." Already some of CPHRE's clients are insisting on a Web completion option for their offline surveys.
Dimensions Makes it Possible
Bill sees two significant advantages in moving to IBM SPSS Data Collection and using a single authoring tool. "It's relatively easy to develop surveys in Quanquest which means we can help ease the skill level required. And if you can make the instruments very similar, then you can reduce the mode effects of using different surveys in different contexts. With mrPaper and mrInterview you can give people the option to do the survey on paper or access it on the Web, and the survey looks identical.
Even for Web–only surveys, Bill finds mrPaper is useful. "It is very difficult to show a Web survey to a client, so it is convenient to be able to print it out, including all the routing and other instructions."
"There are other complementary technologies that are we work with here," Bill continued. "The SPSS MR Data Model allows us to define data for these relatively easily. We can also use the Data Model to build in a lot of range and consistency checks for data quality. And since SPSS is one of our data analytic technologies, it means this integrates nicely with the analysis software we use."
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