The interviewing program displays the questions that the current participant needs to answer. Depending on the complexity of the questionnaire and the answers that the participant gives, the questions that you see might not be the same for every person that you call. Sometimes, the responses that you see for a question will vary according to the participant’s answers to previous questions. Often, your supervisor will go through the questionnaire with you before you start interviewing, so you know what sorts of answers are valid for each question.

Depending on the settings for the Phone Participants activity, you might be able to conduct interviews using the keyboard only, or you might need to use both the keyboard and the mouse. Your supervisor will tell you which of these methods you should use.

For interviews that require the keyboard only, the following keys have special uses:

For interviews that use the mouse, click Next to display the next question and click Previous to display the previous question.

For interviews that require the keyboard only, the methods for answering different types of questions are explained in the following topics.

The following keystrokes can be used in support of keycodes created in UNICOM Intelligence Author and UNICOM Intelligence Professional.

Avoid using keycodes that start with the same characters. Do not define ambiguous keycodes, especially when one keycode is a part of another keycode. For example:

For this question, the interviewer’s intention cannot be determined when the 1 key is pressed. Changing the keycodes to the following would result in better results:

For this question, the interviewer’s intention can be determined because although both keycodes contain 1, the interviewer must press a unique first character.

The Ctrl and Alt keys can be assigned as keycodes, but the user interface Ctrl and Alt assignments will supersede the keycode assignments.

When you click Start Interview, the interviewing program displays the first question in the main part of the screen. For each question, read the exact words of the question out to the participant (excluding any instructions to interviewers), and then enter the participant’s answer.

Most interview pages contain only one question. If a page contains more than one question, you must enter answers for all questions before moving on to the next question.

The interviewing program displays error messages, usually in red, if you enter an invalid answer and waits for you to enter another response.

Depending on the answers the participant gives, you might notice that different questions are displayed for different participants. The interviewing program keeps track of which questions each must answer and always presents the correct questions in the correct order.

At the end of the interview, the review phase (see Reviewing interviews) might start automatically. If it does not, click the Review Completed Interview button if there is one. Otherwise, if your next number is not selected automatically, click Start Dialing or Next Contact if you want to make another call, or Exit to close the Phone Participants activity.