European Identities in the Cloud
As previously reported on this blog, my PhD student and I are doing a CATI survey on European Identities. We opted for queXS (an open source CATI front-end for Limesurvey) and chose a solution hosted by the Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research on Amazon’s network.
Hosted queXS Is Reliable
Initially, we suffered from a few hick-ups that hit the system while interviewing was in full swing: The form would sometimes simply not open at the very beginning of an interview, which understandably drove our interviewers nuts. Support in Australia fixed the problem quickly, but because of the time difference, we had a somewhat anxious night. Voice over IP connectivity was integrated from Australia but provided by a German company. By and large, that worked well, too. We had one major outage but again, after contacting the ACSPR, that was fixed for good.
PCs and Interviewers not yet Virtualised
Lousy Response Rate Not a Software Problem
The one element that we did not virtualise were the interviewers. We had hired a large group of student helpers, which, with hindsight, was not necessarily a brilliant idea. queXS makes it very easy to track operator performance, and so we could quickly see that some of them generated very, very high refusal rates. They all received initial training and constant supervision from us, but some of them would barely manage to get one twenty-minute interview per four-hour shift. Others managed four or more. Our star and role model was a guy who attends acting school. If I could clone and upload him to the cloud, I would be a very happy chappy.
