UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on

Data collected from respondents on paper questionnaires can be entered manually by data entry clerks or automatically by scanning. Scanning uses a combination of mechanical and electronic means to capture the responses from paper questionnaires.

Manually defining a questionnaire as a scanning project can be a lengthy and tedious process, even for a short and simple questionnaire. Not only do you need to define as a field each area from which you want the scanner to capture data, you also need to define how the data in each field is to be verified and stored. Then you need to define recognition and adjustment fields for each page of the questionnaire.

UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on, like UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper, is an add-in to Word and extends the functionality of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper for studies in which you want to scan the completed questionnaires. First you use UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper to format the questionnaire and then you use UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on to define the questionnaire as a scanning project in ReadSoft FORMS, which is an application for scanning information from forms. Before you can scan a completed questionnaire, you must clearly identify where the responses will appear on each page and define the format of the data that will be collected. UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on automates this process, working in conjunction with ReadSoft FORMS.

Using UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on means that you no longer have to define a questionnaire as a scanning project manually. Before the advent of UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on, the amount of work involved in setting up a scanning project was such that scanning was generally seen as a viable option only for the largest paper surveys.

After you have used UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on to set the project up in ReadSoft FORMS Manager, you use the ReadSoft FORMS functionality to scan the completed questionnaires, interpret and verify the data, and transfer it into an UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on transfer (.std) file. You then use the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on Transfer utility to transfer the data from the transfer file to the data format that you want to use for analysis.

You can transfer the data to any format for which a suitable data source component (DSC) is available. A DSC is an interface to a data store. Each DSC is specific to a particular type of data storage. DSCs that write response data are known as case data source components (CDSCs). Case data is the data collected from respondents, which in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on is the scanned data. The UNICOM Intelligence Data Model, which comes with UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper, includes these writable DSCs:

DSC	Description
Quantum CDSC	Writes case data to a Quantum-format ASCII file, for analysis in Quantum or for the generation of a Quanvert database.
Relational MR Database (RDB) CDSC	Writes case data to a relational SQL Server database.
SPSS Statistics SAV DSC	Writes case data to an IBM SPSS .sav file, for analysis in IBM SPSS.
XML CDSC	Writes case data to an XML file. Typically, you use this DSC when you want to transfer case data to another location.
Delimited Text DSC	Writes case data to a text (.csv) file.
SAS DSC	Writes files in the SAS version 7 for Windows, standard-extension format.
UNICOM Intelligence Data File CDSC	Writes case data to a UNICOM Intelligence file-based database that has a .ddf extension. Data Collection Data Files provide a portable alternative to UNICOM Intelligence relational databases for the storage of “offline” UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer Server data.
Triple-S DSC	Writes files that meet the Triple-S standard for the interchange of survey data.

Transferring the scanned data from ReadSoft FORMS: Using UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper/Scan Add‑on Transfer to transfer the scanned data to the format you want to use for storage and analysis.