The electronic questionnaire in ISTAT’s new CAPI/CATI Labour Force Survey

With the aim of complying to EUROSTAT standards, two years ago ISTAT began to design a new labour force survey. After an experimental phase, the survey is now being run in parallel with the current one and will substitute it completely during 2004. Innovations in the new survey concerned both contents and technical aspects. In particular, concerning the survey technique, we passed from a PAPI technique handled by interviewers of the municipalities which entered the sample, to a mixed technique: CAPI for the first family interviews and CATI for the confirmation interviews following the first. The questionnaire for the new survey is particularly complex and consists in a general opening part which collects information on the family’s demographic characteristics and 12 sections of which 10 are repeated for each family member. The use of an electronic questionnaire has allowed for automatic branching, the activation of online help upon request of the interviewer, the interactive coding of open items using a search engine for certain key variables (such as economic activity and profession), the introduction of soft and hard control mechanisms of range and coherence (with the possibility of conciliating on the spot), managing confirmation items for waves following the first. All of this has helped simplify the interview and therefore significantly improve data quality. To evaluate such improvement, we have compared the off-line check programme of the old survey with the on-line check programme of the new survey, analysing the number of partial non-responses, the number of edit activations, the number of conciliations in the new survey and the number of soft controls purposefully not corrected (which shouldn’t therefore be imputed automatically). The significantly better results for the new survey have confirmed the correctness of the choice of an electronic questionnaire as data collection instrument. Comparisons between the qualitative standards of the two surveys will be developed in order to analyse longitudinal aspects of the sample, examining in detail the effects of a confirmation questionnaire in the waves following the first and the use of a CATI technique