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CAPI Interviewing with "SSI Web CAPI"
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| 1. | Develop your study as you would for Web interviewing, including setting up passwords, etc.
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| 2. | Test the study to ensure it works properly, including checking skip patterns, examining the resulting data, conducting a pre-test, etc.
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| 3. | Use Field | Create CAPI Packages to create a "CAPI package," which is a single file (.CAPI extension) that contains all the information necessary to run the study. If multiple PCs (not networked) are used in interviewing, you may want to create multiple .CAPI files, one for each interviewing PC, for better field data management.
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| 4. | Install the "SSI Web CAPI" software on laptops or PCs used for interviewing. This is freely downloaded software from our website. Or, you can burn this installation program onto a CD-ROM to deliver to the data collection facility. (The CAPI installation program is also included in the "CAPI" subdirectory of the SSI Web program.)
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| 5. | Email or otherwise deliver the .CAPI file(s) to the data collection facility. They load the study into SSI Web CAPI and begin interviewing. They can give you periodic reports regarding the number of complete, incomplete and disqualified records.
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| 6. | The data collection facility sends you a data file for each .CAPI file that was loaded and used for interviewing, which represents all data records collected to that point.
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| 7. | Place each data file within a folder on your computer. Select Field | Accumulate CAPI Data File(s)… and select the folder that contains the data files. That folder is searched for .dat files with the format STUDYNAME_#.dat, where # is a number.
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| Beginning CAPI Package Index Number
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| Creating multiple .CAPI packages and indexing them is a useful aid for field data management, however, there isn't any requirement that you create multiple packages. In reality, multiple .CAPI files from the same study are identical in every way (assuming you didn't change anything else about your study between .CAPI file creation sessions, such as to add new passwords or modify the questionnaire). Select a beginning number for the .CAPI package(s) to be created in the current session. If you select "1" as the starting point (with multiple packages to create), the .CAPI packages are named starting with STUDYNAME_1.CAPI. The next .CAPI packages in the series follow as STUDYNAME_2.CAPI, STUDYNAME_3.CAPI, etc.
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| You can create .CAPI packages in multiple sessions. For example, you may discover after a few days of interviewing that you want to create a few additional .CAPI packages. If you earlier had created .CAPI packages 1-10, you might now create .CAPI packages 11-20. (If for some reason you wanted to start naming the files in the second session starting with #83, it wouldn't matter. Again, the numbers attached to files are merely to help you organize and manage files coming from potentially multiple sources in the field.)
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| Some SSI Web users that are familiar with our other interviewing systems (such as Ci3 or SMRT) may wonder how the beginning respondent numbers are specified for each .CAPI file, or how many respondents are allowed per .CAPI installation. Internally, we use a random seed based on the system clock to assign each record an internal respondent number (this is used as a seed for question/item randomizations and assignment to CBC designs). If you interview many respondents, it is possible to get duplicates (there are 475,254 possible unique internal respondent IDs). However, we generally recommend that you use a different variable (such as User Name or Passwords) as respondent IDs, or that you simply export the data with the cases numbered sequentially from 1 through n. We don't suggest you use SSI Web's internal respondent number in analysis. Each .CAPI installation can collect up to 475,254 possible respondents.
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| Number of CAPI Package Files to Create
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| Select the number of .CAPI files to create within the current session. If the PCs or laptops used for interviewing operate independently, then you may want to create one file per interviewing PC, for ease of field data management. (If you and your field agency would not be bothered by different batches of respondents having the same file name, then you are welcome to create a single .CAPI package and distribute this same file to all data collection sites and PCs.)
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| The name of the .CAPI files follows directly from your study name. If the study is named ABCD and you create 10 CAPI packages, starting with an index number of 1, the files are named ABCD_1.CAPI, ABCD_2.CAPI . . . ABCD_10.CAPI.
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| Warning: Only one .CAPI file with the same study name should be used by each computer. If (using the SSI Web CAPI program) the interviewer loads a second .CAPI file (say XXXX_2.CAPI) onto a PC that has already been interviewing using a XXXX_1.CAPI installation, all the data files for the XXXX_1.CAPI installation will be overwritten (though we always store vital data in a sub-directory of the /Archive folder within a SSI Web CAPI installation prior to deleting any data). We provide a warning dialog within the CAPI module prior to any step that would delete the data.
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| Directory to Create CAPI Package Files:
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| This indicates the folder in which to save the .CAPI files, and is located inside your study folder. You cannot change this folder.
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| Include Administrative Module
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| If you want the individual(s) conducting data collection to have access to SSI Web's Online Administrative Module, check this. We generally suggest not including the module, unless the individual(s) performing data collection have a good understanding of the functionality of the Administrative Module.
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| Even without including the Administrative Module, the SSI Web CAPI program lets the data collection facility accumulate data for each .CAPI file into a single data file, and gives them a tally of the number of completes, incompletes, and disqualified records in each data file.
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