better control and more features

The latest released versions of CfMC's Survent for CATI bring greater efficiency and functionality to the most robust CATI tool on the market.

Clients adopting the newest release of Survent will realize great gains in productivity when they adopting webCATI, equipped with webSuper, your online management tool for managing and reporting on CATI interviewing operations.

These enhancements to Survent give researchers the capability to conduct remote interviewing (with internal resources or partners) and manage projects, sample, and quality from anywhere - and on one central server. Your resources are now scalable.

Here is brief summary of the new features available in the latest versions.

I. increases in size parameters

Survent 7.7's changes in size parameters allow you to perform almost any operation without worrying about how big something can be or how many of something is allowable. The changes that will affect most people are:

• number of studies, stations, and sample records : The number of concurrent studies has increased from 200 to 400: concurrent stations have been increased from 2,000 to 10,000 and the number of sample records per sample file have been increased from 500,000 to one million.
• quotas and markets: You can now have approximately 1,000 markets and the quotas that go along with them instead of the previous limit of 150 triple quotas and 250 markets.
• question size: This has doubled, allowing, for instance, 700 code question lists. The size of conditional statements has increased tenfold, the amount of code text is five times higher, the amount of open-end text is now 5,000 characters per question, and amount of data allowed per question has increased from 240 to 3,000 columns.

II. interviewing features

• webCATI released: WebCATI allows you to run interviewers in a browser-based environment.
• enhanced modes: Change Interviewer mode, Debug mode, Practice mode, and View mode all have been enhanced.
• better screen movement/displays: You can move on code lists based on the response text (move to item), use new key combinations for paging, begin and end. There is complete rotation control of code lists on the screen, larger lists, nicer displays with enhanced screens (eg. Duplicate lists and Study choice) in many places.
• more operational information available: Time between questions logging, current time displayed on screen, and the response to the previous question on current screen now available.

III. operational features

• do more without paying a license fee: programmers can work at home without a software key, and we provide a copy of Mentor to run reports without a software license.
• every answer is logged and the data file is automatically backed up after each interview.
• update partial completes rather than write multiple records (optional)
• a new save-data option in case of operation failures: If a terminal gets disconnected, the software attempts to save the data and sample record. If a “blow” error occurs due to programming problems, the software performs in the same way. In addition, the suspend data is backed up automatically.
• better Survent summary logging and reports have been added; it is easier to write your own reports; you can log anything you want into your own customized log file.
• total support for long and case-sensitive filenames in UNIX

 

IV. enhanced supervisory features

• webSuper: manage quotas, activate and report on interviewer activity, and much more with a few clicks of the mouse.
• new VIEW mode added for review and/or alteration to completed interviews.
• a market (quota) summary screen has been added to see how many numbers are available in open markets.
• review a particular sample record's information.
• control the total study with one command instead of using a list of stations on the study.

V. programming features

• better error checking: the software will not allow data overlapping and quota name mismatches. The software provides a new error summary at the end of compiles so you can see the types of errors and warnings found. Unlabeled questions are labeled so you can find them more easily.
• easier to make column-free questionnaires with a new WORK data location that assigns questions to the next available location in the work area.
• easier graphics - it is now much easier to program graphics on screens with defaults for various display features across questions.
• all question types have a blank option (allowing questions to be left blank).
• question code lists can be rotated in any fashion , much like groups of questions.
• languages can be separated onto separate code lists within questions.
• new functions: In particular, date-time functions to return differences and various formats, a function to find text, new counting functions, etc.

VI. improved utilities

• improved and reorganized utilities; there are now fewer utilities that have more features. Web versions of some utilities are available now and the rest will be available soon.
• Web output is available in all utilities
• the Reformat utility has many new features:
• it supports the sss_xml standard
• you can export code text instead of codes for data bases
• you can export 0/1 Field type variables for statistical testing
• you can export to Excel and the program will split the file into subsets of 255 questions each to fit into Excel
• SQL export is coming soon

VII. webSurvent/webCATI

• pass variables into and out of webSurvent or webCATI.
• run multiple questionnaires that access the same study.
• control the display of complex grids with simple !HTML control commands that apply to all parts of the questions.
• rotate grids; you can have color control across rotated grids.
• data is saved when you back up.

VIII. ODBC support

Finally, there is support for ODBC-compliant databases. You can read from and write to the database during live interviewing from Survent, webSurvent, or webCATI or by using Mentor's IO for tables or data processing.