meaning: The Macer View/11

	The Macer View
	Comment and analysis from Tim Macer Number 11, June 2005

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The Macer View

Conference analysis: Tim Macer reports from the ASC's mobile computing conference where CAPI technology held court.

CAPI has matured into an indispensable face-to-face interviewing method and diverged into a cluster of related interviewing technologies, according to speakers at the ASC’s recent Mobile Computing conference at Imperial College, London.

After ten years of CAPI at Mori, AJ Johnson sees it as a key tool to keep response high. He said: “We consistently find the respondent rate is higher [with CAPI], respondents are more willing to participate and more willing to give more personal information, and they see it as more professional.”

Johnson thinks that web-connected CAPI through wireless telephony is a key future development. “CAPI will certainly grow at the expense of paper” he said, but cited the proliferation of different solutions as a barrier. “We need to work with other agencies on really large surveys, and we are all using different software. It does make it very awkward,” he stated.

The US Census Bureau’s Jennifer Hunter explored the complexities of converting paper-based survey instruments to handheld devices with their limited screen sizes in what could claim to be the largest CAPI study undertaken of some 20% of the US population on a total of one million interviewing devices.

Her advice was to avoid scrolling interfaces and look to use ‘unfolding questions’ where answers are grouped and give access to lower-level questions.

Nick Moon, from NOP, spoke of the dilemmas of keeping a 900-strong laptop pool going. “We find the physical life of the machines is longer than their ‘intellectual’ life”, he said. Yet despite this, 25% tend to break every year, suggesting a rolling replacement strategy of retiring and replacing a quarter of the stock every year offers the best return. NOP has moved over to tablet PCs with a passive stylus rather than laptops or handhelds. Fortunately, someone discovered that crochet needles were as effective and a lot cheaper than the official stylus which interviewers tended to lose “at a rate you would not believe” said Moon, advising would-be buyers to steer clear of devices with optical pens.

NOP is now looking to use PDAs as well. “Our holy grail is to find a suitable piece of software that we can run on every interviewing platform.”

Mark Cameron, from Techneos, a software company specialising in mobile CAPI stressed the importance of “taking a platform agnostic approach” to software development. “When [Apple’s] Newton died, it left a lot of developers with nothing to deploy their software to.” A concern that is specially relevant now, as the market for PDAs and mobile telephony converges.

It is by no means clear whether the two technologies from the PDAs-Windows CE and PalmOS will continue to dominate when challenged by Symbian, which is the OS embedded in the new generation of smart phones.

Cameron also sees opportunities for MR to exploit RFID, or radio-frequency identification tags that are starting to be used in retail, and location-based services from the wireless internet, where the specific location of the device is known through triangulation from cellular base stations.

He acknowledged that the technology is not quite ready for stale MR uses yet. “Internet and wireless are changing the face of computing, but don’t push them faster than they are going. The way it eventually goes will be determined by demand.”