The Quality Control Process

Overview

Quality Control is one of the key aspects in every research project. Every organization has adopted a relevant Quality Control process that matches the nature or projects the organization runs. While planning your projects you need to understand what Quality Control aspects you would like to apply for those projects and implement those accordingly in order to make sure that once the project is run you will have the required information and settings that will allow you to apply the process. 

Lets review the 3 main stages and the relevant aspects of each that make part of the Control Process:

In this article we will review the different stages and drill down and explain how you can use SurveyToGo to implement your Quality Control Process.

Prepare SurveyToGo to support your Quality control Process

Ensuring that your SurveyToGo environment meets your Quality Control process is key in the process. This is the stage where what you set up will determine if you would eventually be able to practice your quality control process once the project is in field. 

You should think of the following major points:

• Quality indicators - Decide what quality control factors would you want to include in your reviews:
  • Location related information
  • Questionnaire parts duration
  • Sound/video/photo capturing during the interview
  • Logical quality related conditions
  • Surveyors related productivity KPIs
• Plan your Quality Check List and Scores - build a check list to guide your office quality control personnel while they review interviews and measure surveyors based on the outcome
• Personnel Responsibilities - which supervisors will be responsible for which surveyors and/or groups. Use the QA Responsible settings to determine what interviews your supervisors will be able to perform the quality process on. Doing this will disallow access to the interviews done by surveyors that are not under the specific supervisor's responsibility.
• Roles and Permissions - What roles will make part of the quality control process and what will their permissions be:
  • Who should be able to view/change/edit/delete interviews data in every specific project
  • Who has access to what quality control chapters
  • Who can change what interview statuses   
• Supervision method - Define which supervisors will be doing their work 
  • Accompanying - When supervisors are accompanying the surveyors you would probably want to build a quality control survey for your supervisors to fill in parallel to the interview being conducted. Make sure both the actual survey script and the quality control one have a place to enter a common identifier so that later both could be identified as correlated when viewed in the Studio.
  • Onsite Back Check - Use the quality control survey for your supervisors to fill in. You can have them use the fieldwork management application to review the collected data if required:  Fieldwork Management Application. You can also use the automatic back check functionality that allows you to automatically send completed surveyors interviews back to their supervisors for review and update if needed as described here Auto Back Check
  • Telephony/Office Back Check - Use the Studio to review the data and associated quality related information (location, duration, recordings, flags). During review you can have your QC team follow a quality check list by adding a QA chapter to your survey as described here Quality Control Chapter

Script

When scripting your survey take into account the planned Quality Control indicators and include them in your script. Make sure that:

• Aside to the auto captured Net and Total duration ensure that required questionnaire duration are captured
• Recordings are set to the relevant parts of the interview
• Aside to the auto capture interview location add your required location capturing points during the interview using location questions or auto capturing those in the script
• Setup the flags that will auto flag the interview for review either by one of the configuration enabled settings or by script based on your own logical scheme 

Test 

To make sure that the process is implemented and works as expected we recommend to conduct several interviews and test check the entire QC process both in the field and in the back office.

Production QC

Based on what you have scripted int he above stages once the fieldwork has started you will do the actual Quality Control work. Once the Quality team has completed their checks the interview can be either 'Approved' or will continue with additional processes according to the plan.