A paper-based questionnaire is just one of many ways that you can conduct an interview. You can also conduct an interview as a computer-assisted personal interview (CAPI), a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI), over the internet, or as a combination of these methods.

You create the questionnaire definition in one of the UNICOM Intelligence questionnaire authoring tools: UNICOM Intelligence Author and UNICOM Intelligence Professional. These tools can create studies for use in one or more interviewing environments: pen and paper interviewing, computer-assisted personal interviewing, computer assisted telephone interviewing, and web. Regardless of the method used to present the study, all of the different applications access the questionnaire definition data through the same file: the UNICOM Intelligence Metadata Document (.mdd) file.

The .mdd file contains the definition or content of the questionnaire: for example, the question texts, response lists, and instructions. This file might also contain additional information, such as routing information, translations of the texts, different versions of the study, and so on. Some of this information might not be relevant to the paper questionnaire.

Because all of the applications access the same .mdd file for the questionnaire definition, it is important that you make any changes to the content of the questionnaire in the authoring tool and not in the Word document in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper. For example, if you want to change a text or correct a spelling error in a question, make the change in the authoring tool and then use the Update Document command in UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper to transfer the changes to the UNICOM Intelligence Interviewer - Paper document. The same applies to reordering and adding and deleting questions and information items.