Quota control when reviewing interviews

The main purpose of reviewing interviews is for quality control so it is important that reviewers are able to follow the original path through the interview. Often, the path that respondents take through the interview script is determined by quota control. For example, if the project uses least full prioritization for multiple choice responses, the rest of the rest of the interview is wholly dependent on the state of the quotas at the point they were tested. Therefore, instead of retesting the quotas when the interview is reviewed, you should reuse the original results of the pend request even if they would normally be invalid for new interviews at this point.

The other important point about reviewing interviews is that the review process should not affect the quota counts in any way. Instead, it needs to ignore any instructions to interact with the quota control system. It is your responsibility to set this up. If you forget to do this, the review process will repend quota cells during the review process and increment the counts of completed interviews at the end of the review. In effect, it will be as if you conducted two separate but identical interviews.

To reuse the original quota results for reviewed interviews and to ensure that the review does not affect the quota counts in any way, place the following code around the code that implements quota control. If there is more than one quota test in the script, place these statements around each set of quota control code.

▪<question> is the name of a categorical question whose answer contains the quota cells that were pended during the original interview. For example, if quotas were set for different brands of ice cream, this question’s answer would be the brands that were pended when the interview originally took place.

This code takes advantage of the fact that when an interview is reviewed, all the data that is held for it becomes off-path. As the reviewer steps through the interview and accepts the current answers, that data becomes flagged as being on-path again. By placing the result of the quota test on-path you make its value available to the review and the interview will continue as it did when the quotas were originally tested.

If your script does not have a question that records the names of the pended cells, you can easily change it to work in this fashion. Of course, this does not matter if you are sure that interviews for the project will never be reviewed.