Conferences

The “Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe” (SHARE) has developed an electronic sample management system (SMS) which allows for a realtime monitoring process which is standardized across all participating countries. The SMS was designed by CentERdata, MEA and SRC and programmed by CentERdata. The SMS enables the central management team of SHARE, but also the survey agencies, to analyse a huge variety of fieldwork progress indicators on different levels – either in total, by country or by single interviewers. We are able to monitor not only current results of the fieldwork such as changes in the net sample, number of contacted households or number of completed cases, but we can also closely monitor interviewer activities as the SMS stores date, time and outcome of each single contact or contact attempt made by the interviewer. The SMS is installed on the laptop the interviewer uses in order to conduct the interview. The questionnaire itself can only be started from the SMS. Interviewers are supposed to send their data to their survey agency at least every other week. Survey agencies in turn collect the data from the interviewers and bi-weekly sent it to CentERdata. Every two weeks the collected data is uploaded to a central server, where the fieldwork coordination team downloads and analyses the data. Since the data entered into and exported from the SMS in standardized for all countries the SMS facilitates cross-country comparisons. Thus, a large variety of fieldwork indicators can be produced and possible problems can be detected timely which makes it easier to implement strategies in order to enhance the fieldwork quality.

But such a system also has pitfalls. The usage of the SMS requires intensive training – with survey agency representatives as well as with interviewers. But still interviewers make mistakes when using the SMS. This can for example be shown by contacts which – according to what the interviewer enters – have taken place at very unlikely times (in the middle of the night). Interviewers also need to be trained to enter every contact attempt – even if the attempt was unsuccessful. Further, the interviewer may additionally have to apply a paper and pencil system, since it is more difficult to electronically note down contact records at the doorstep. There are also adaptation problems (especially in the beginning) since the survey agencies have to work with a system that might differ a lot from the systems they usually use.