Getting into the field requires the selection and training of interviewers as well as their deployment and management.
Interviewers
Whenever possible, only trained and experienced interviewers should be used. In any case, training is extremely important. If professional interviewers are not being used, the process of selecting respondents in the household need to be reviewed thoroughly. The questionnaire should also be covered extensively, including how questions questions should be read and certain words emphasized. The importance of not prompting respondents inappropriately should be stressed and interviewers should be cautioned against giving their own opinion either explicitly or implicitly through clothing, facial expressions, or body languages. Even experienced interviewers must be trained extensively with a new questionnaire.
Because they often work cheaply, university students are often hiredto conduct interviews. A word of caution about this option is in order, however. Students who are interested in sociopolitical surveys often are politically active and may be more prone to communicate their own preferences to respondents in implicit and even explicit ways.
As mentioned above, one should make sure that interviews are from the same background as their respondents, especially if the survey touches on related mattes. On some occasions, however, it might be desirable to follow a different procedure.
Fieldwork
Fieldwork should be done under the strict supervision of field supervisors. Most respected companies will conduct call backs to at least 10 to15 percent of the households interviewed, find the person interviewed to confirm they were actually interviewed, and also to go through some of the questions to verify that the answers recorded were actually their answers.
Probably even more important than doing this, is that the interviewers know that it will be done and that their payment will depend on getting satisfactory results from the call backs. As a cross section of society, fieldwork interviewers are no different from an ordinary cross section of society. And, unfortunately, many a story has been told by exasperated researchers of finding their field workers sitting under a tree and filling in questionnaires with fictitious names, addresses, and answers. Call backs can be done by phone if such service is widespread in a population. If not, they need to be done in person and probably before an interview team leaves an area.
Field supervisors should also check all questionnaires before the team leaves an area to make sure everything has been filled in completely and correctly, and if not, send the interviewer back to that person and obtain the necessary information.
Receiving Data
Actual responses will then need to be entered into a computer readable format. There are several statistical software packages that provide accessible data entry features and can also read and manipulate that data once it is entered. SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is one widely-used program.
Fieldwork companies typically will enter the data and even provide a technical report. Even so, the organization paying for the survey should obtain its own data set on computer disk, preferably compatible with SPSS format. The organization may also want to do its own analysis, or if it is inexperienced in statistics, contract another individual or entity to to do this. The organization should, however retain the freedom to monitor and evaluate what is provided. Just as important, there are probably much larger sets of data manipulations, cross tabulations, or correlations that could be run, but that a survey company will not present in its technical report.
Time
To do a proper job, the length of time, from conceptualization to actual data analysis and report writing, can be unexpectedly long. Even when it is absolutely imperative to go into the field quickly to capture public reactions to some fast-breaking event, it is hard to imagine doing a good job in less than six weeks.
Personal interviews of a national sample could often take the most experienced company several weeks to complete. Larger projects, such as attempting to test some model of voter participation, will usually take at least several months or even up to a year if fastidious academics become involved.
Costs
Project costs will include administration costs, data entry, and general overhead. The largest portion of these costs usually is for fieldwork and includes costs of transport, lodging, and the actual labour of interviewers and field supervisors. The latter are determined by the number of interviews to be done, the number of phone calls or household visits required to realise the
number of actual interviews, the number of hard-to-reach areas to be visited, and the length of each interview. Thus sample size, stratification, interview clustering, and whether a probability or a quota sample is used are important both methodologically as well as financially.
Given the costs associated with conducting independent surveys, however, it is possible to buy space for one or two, or sometimes even a dozen or so, questions on on-going market research surveys. Market research organisations tend to conduct surveys on a regular basis, and because a number of their clients may include questions, the costs of the survey are shared. Costs often can be calculated on a 'per question' basis, sometimes with an initial 'buy-in' charge. Many organisations decide to 'piggy-back' their questions onto ongoing omnibus surveys. This is very efficient when one only wants to put a few questions to a representative sample, such as checking on current levels of interest in the next election, or current levels of registration. Also, the frequency of such omnibus surveys allows one to check these issues on a
more regular basis and to monitor trends over time.
Some questions, like 'Why are people uninterested?' or 'Why are they not yet registered?', lead to many other questions. The more questions, the higher the costs. In addition, it may be desirable to get respondents focused on issues of voting, elections, and democracy in order to obtain more thoughtful and considered responses. With an omnibus survey, there may be no control over whether respondents are answering a question about the competitiveness of elections immediately after being asked about their monthly consumption of motor oil. Finally, due to reasons of cost and client interest, ongoing market research surveys may not be done in remote rural areas or poorer areas.
