One of the main concerns of any telephone room supervisor is to achieve as many completed interviews as possible within the survey parameters. This entails not only monitoring and managing the availability of numbers for calling and the parameters that control the selection of sample records, but also checking that interviewers are working properly. Most interviewers conduct interviews according to your company rules, but you might find some who try various methods of artificially boosting their productivity. One such method is to conduct interviews themselves for respondents who refuse to be interviewed. The respondent terminates the call but, instead of selecting the appropriate Refused option, the interviewer selects the Proceed with Interview option and fills in random answers to the questions.

You can catch interviewers who do this by checking, just before the end of the script, that the interview is still connected to a call and writing a message to a log file if this is not the case. The statement that checks the connection is:

where <variable> is a temporary (Dim'd) variable of your choice. Its value will be True if the interview is connected to a call and False if it is not. The following example writes a message to the interview log file (ISE*.log) whenever the variable is False.

The message is written as an error rather than a warning so that the supervisor will notice it and can take action against the named interviewer. All messages in the log file include the interview serial number (the –r parameter), so the supervisor can tell the project manager that this interview needs to be removed from the data file.