Reviewing interviews
Reviewing of completed interviews is often used as a means of quality control for telephone interviews where you want to verify that either the interviews were carried out or interviewers have entered the respondents’ answers correctly. UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer offers this facility for all projects that support telephone interviewing. If a project supports both Web and telephone interviews, only the telephone interviews can be reviewed. Interviewers can review just their current interviews; supervisors can review any completed interview. The TextQuestionsOnly interview property controls whether all questions can be reviewed or only those with text responses (including those who Other Specify response contains a value).
When an interview is started for review, the interviewing program replays the interview from start to end but does not complete the interview. Instead, it presents the last page of the interview to the reviewer and waits for the reviewer to click Next. The same thing happens if the reviewer navigates directly to the last page of the interview from any point before it. When interviewers review their current interviews, the interviewing program executes all statements in the script as necessary. When supervisors review interviews, the review process ignores the following instructions in the interview script:
▪requests to check or update quotas
▪requests to read or write sample data
▪calculations.
The pages for reviewed interviews look much the same as those for live interviews, except that they have a navigation bar that lists the questions that have been answered. This allows the reviewer to pick questions at random rather than stepping through the interview sequentially one question at a time.
If pages display a Stop button, the reviewer can use this to stop the review in the same way that an interviewer stops an interview. If the reviewer has changed anything on the page, these changes are discarded. The LastQuestionAsked property is not updated since this reflects the last question that the respondent was asked during the live interview.
Interviewers can change responses at any time during the review just as they can during the main part of the interview. When reviewers change responses, the changes are saved when they click Next or Last to move to the next or last question. If the change alters the path through the interview, any original interview data that becomes off-path is retained so a record of the original interview is always available.
When changing an answer alters the path through the interview, the interviewing program warns the reviewer that this is happening. The reviewer might then decide to continue the interview to gather the new data, or they might undo the change by clicking Previous, and then reentering the original answer.
If the original interview is found to be at fault, reviewers can click Reject. This:
▪removes the {completed} category from DataCollection.Status so that just {reviewed} is set
▪sets DataCleaning.ReviewStatus to {FlaggedForDelete}
▪sets the call outcome to RejectedByReviewer. (The Reject button is displayed only for reviewed interviews and is not one of the standard scriptable navigation buttons whose appearance is under the control of the scriptwriter.)
▪moves the sample record into the UNUSABLE queue.
When a supervisor reviews an interview the following things happen at the start of the interview:
▪In the case data, the {reviewed} category is added to DataCollection.Status and DataCollection.DateReviewed is set to the current date
▪In the sample record, the PreviousInterviewerId property is updated with the reviewer’s name.
DataCollection.FinishTime in the case data is not affected by reviews since it refers to the time at which the original interview ended.
When an interviewer reviews his/her current interview, the interviewing program writes a separate history record to the sample history table recording the amount of time spent reviewing.
The review process logs the following information to the IVW log file:
▪the fact that the interview is being reviewed
▪the reviewer’s name (ID)
▪for each change, the question name, the original value, and the new value
▪the fact that a change resulted in a different path through the interview (changes by supervisors only).
The Interviewer Monitoring activity includes interviewers who are monitoring interviews in its summary display. If a supervisor chooses to monitor one of these interviewers, the monitoring screen displays a reminder that the interview is being reviewed. Supervisors’ review sessions are not included in the summary display and cannot be monitored.
See also