How to Leverage Silent Voice Recording to Refine Your Surveys and Maximize Your Data Collection Potential
If you’ve ever launched a market research survey campaign in hopes of collecting data that will provide key insights on a topic or issue, you know that not all survey datasets are built the same.
Quality survey data is essential to the integrity of your research and the success of your operations. Capturing quality survey data, however, is often easier said than done.
Sometimes, you get datasets containing extremely detailed and articulate responses to your most important questions. The respondent covered the right topics, their answers were easy to understand, and their commentary was unique or engaging. This kind of data can fuel your greater research studies because it offers such valuable insight for your target audiences.
Other times, you get beyond questionable datasets—they’re downright useless. You can’t tell if the surveyor was making critical mistakes or if the respondent accidentally forgot to answer half of the questions included in your survey questionnaire. The data is either inaccurate, heavily manipulated, or missing altogether.
It raises the question: why does this happen?
The inherent nature of survey fieldwork presents a series of challenges that can deteriorate the productivity and quality of a survey. These challenges aren’t just frustrating from a data collection perspective—they can also be extremely costly over time.
Mistakes are bound to happen in the field. Whether it be the surveyor forgetting a key part of their procedure or an error with a CAPI survey, you should be ready for errors to pop up along your surveying journey.
That said, it is vital to distinguish honest and correctable mistakes from those that simply should not be tolerated. While some errors are made earnestly, others may arise under suspicious or fraudulent conditions.
By identifying these errors and implementing solutions accordingly, you can enhance the quality of your survey data capture, optimize your fieldwork sessions, and reduce the costs associated with poor survey data.
Data Dumpster Fires
Before jumping into the best way to identify the culprits behind your sub-par datasets, we must first face the challenges that plague modern survey campaigns.
If you’ve noticed that some of your datasets include respondents providing incomplete assessments, you may have one or a combination of procedural errors impacting your campaign.
For starters, your surveyor may inadvertently skip required questions or forget to ask subjects questions that branch out within a given flow after the respondent provides a specific answer to an earlier question in the sequence.
Perhaps your surveyor is asking the right questions, but they aren’t articulating them as they should. Maybe they mispronounce keywords or phrases or emphasize the wrong parts of a question. These errors could confuse respondents or cause them to mishear the question entirely. No matter the case, the data extracted from a session like this is almost guaranteed to yield poor results.
In some cases, surveyors may have little to no intention of carrying out their assigned fieldwork. They may attempt to answer questions themselves, solicit answers from friends or family, or rush through sessions with actual respondents to fulfill their time commitments as quickly as possible.
While it may be difficult or disheartening to consider that full-time employees or part-time contractors may be attempting to circumvent their responsibilities, this is an unfortunately common occurrence. The bad actors who exhibit deviant interviewer behavior are often referred to as falsifiers.
Falsifiers can ruin the credibility of a survey campaign without much effort. In many cases, these falsifiers will attempt to manipulate the survey data collection software used in the campaign to make it appear as though they are conducting interviews properly.
Now that we know what kinds of errors may be present in our survey data, how can we prevent them from occurring?
Your New Secret Weapon—Silent Audio Recording
Have you ever seen a thriller movie or action show where the police wire up an informant with audio-recording equipment?
If your answer was yes, you are already semi-familiar with the idea of silent recording.
When it comes to leveraging CAPI tools with silent recording capabilities, there are two differences from an FBI-style wiretap:
- Your surveyors may not know when or if they are being recorded.
- Neither your surveyor nor respondent are assumed to be malicious actors with criminal intent ( … we hope).
In all seriousness, silent audio recording can offer tremendous value and provide key insights into your surveyor’s sessions. Using survey questionnaire software with built-in silent recording features can make a major difference in terms of quality control.
With the audio recordings of your surveys, you can listen in to the conversations between your interviewers and their subjects to hear how and when certain questions are asked within a given sequence. You will be able to make note of all of the instances in which a surveyor missed a question in a sequence, made a logic or flow-related error, or confused an interviewee because of poor articulation.
From there, you can provide constructive feedback to your team members working in the field. You may realize that additional training sessions are needed so your interviewers can sound more confident when relaying information to respondents or that parts of the established question sequence are clunky and confusing for your target audience.
Identifying suspicious interview sessions is another added benefit of silent recording. If an interviewer is rushing through a survey or engaging with an unqualified respondent, you can quickly pinpoint the erroneous sessions and swiftly address the situation as you see fit.
Also (and this should come as no surprise), if you don’t hear ANYTHING during a live recording of a survey session, it’s safe to assume your surveyor is not carrying out their duties as instructed.
It’s important to note that recording laws vary depending on your country. It is in your best interest to ensure your organization complies with all government regulations regarding audio recording.
How and When to Record
There are plenty of reasons why you may want to record a survey.
Now the question is even more simple: how will you do it?
Firms will often adjust their recording strategy based on their data collection objectives:
- If your questionnaire is brief and you want to ensure your interviewer is asking all of the questions in the sequence, you may want to consider recording sessions in their entirety. However, this may not be the best approach for all of your survey campaigns.
- Let’s say you are concerned with the data from one section of one of your longer surveys. You notice that responses seem to be missing from this section, and you want to determine the reason for said gaps. Recording an entire interview would be nothing more than a waste of your data and time. You won’t want to go back and listen to a ten-minute recording for a one-minute section of interest; it would be far more beneficial to just record that specific chapter instead.
- Taking things to an even more granular level—in the case of a single question yielding poor results, you can use the same logic from the previous example and apply it again by enabling the recording for even shorter durations. This strategy allows you to get to the bottom of the issues stemming from specific questions within your campaigns.
If you are debating when you should launch a campaign with silent recording enabled, consider what you want to do with the recordings once they are in your possession.
If you want to determine the reliability of your field workers, you may want to record their first interviews in their entirety. After providing feedback, you could launch a supplementary campaign to review the areas you thought needed improvement after the initial campaign.
Generally speaking, your data collection goals will be the biggest determining factor dictating the timing of your recorded campaigns.
SurveyToGo
If you want to leverage silent recording through a data collection platform that serves as much more than a mere survey questionnaire maker, look no further than SurveyToGo.
SurveyToGo makes creating CAPI market research tablet surveys a quick and painless process and offers some of the most advanced silent recording features available on the market to date.
With SurveyToGo, commanding the entire quality control process is a seamless experience.
Take full advantage of the silent audio recording feature to monitor interview sessions and measure session quality, as well as the photo and video capturing options available within the platform.
These options allow users to snap images and videos from the device’s back or front camera at any point throughout the session—without notifying the interviewer. You can even record photos and videos from both cameras simultaneously for the ultimate capture experience. Record full interviews, specific sections, or individual questions with ease.
Take the reigns of SurveyToGo’s state-of-the-art quality control subsystem, which enables users to approve, reject, and flag interviews with the click of a button. All recorded audio clips, images, and videos are automatically attached to each interview and made available in the Operation console for your team’s visibility.
Are you ready to reap the benefits of silent recording and gain actionable insights from your survey datasets? Click here to schedule a demo with one of our team members.
SurveyToGo in action: Check out our most recent case study with Ad’Hoc Research by clicking here.