When you have respondents in more than one time zone or in a time zone that differs from the time zone in which interviewers are located, you can specify each respondent's time zone in the TimeZone field in the sample record. If you want interviewers to be able to arrange appointments, ensure that this field contains a non-null value. It therefore important that you set a non-null default TimeZone when loading sample records if you want appointments to be made. This happens automatically if you create sample tables using the Participants activity, but if you create the sample tables manually, it is your responsibility to ensure that the default for the TimeZone field is not null.

The value that you enter in this field must be the index of the time zone in the list of time zones stored in the registry. The default is the local Windows server's time zone setting. This is used if the TimeZone field is empty or undefined, or if there is a problem reading from the field. When interviewers are presented with the appointment setting page, the time zone field shows the respondent's time zone as a text. Internally, all time zone handling is performed using UTC times.

In order for the time zone information in the sample records to be used, the telephone interviewing supervisor must specify the following details using the Interviewing Options activity:

When an interviewer requests a record to call, the sample management script should check which of the project's time zones are currently within the valid calling times and restrict selections to records in those time zones only when applying any other record selection criteria.

For example, suppose that interviewers based in time zone 85 (GMT) are calling respondents in time zones 85 and 110 (Western Europe Standard time, which is one hour ahead of GMT). It is a weekday, and weekday calling times are 9am to 5pm. If an interviewer requests a record at 3:30pm, calls can be made to respondents in either time zone, and other factors such as appointment times and interviewer qualifications are used to determine which record is assigned to the interviewer. If the same interviewer requests another record at 4:45pm, all records for respondents in time zone 110 is ignored because it is now too late to call those respondents. Similarly, if an interviewer requests a record at 8:15am, only records in time zone 110 will be available because it is still too early for respondents in time zone 85 to be called.

For more information on modifying existing time zone settings and creating new time zones, see the following Microsoft support articles: