computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI)

Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) is a telephone survey with computer support conducted by call centers. In this technique, a questionnaire or individual questions are successively superimposed on the interviewer's screen. The interviewer is connected to the interviewee by telephone and must enter the interviewee's answers directly into the computer before asking the next question.

In Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, the computer program evaluates the entries,checks for deviations from the question catalog or skipping of questions, and checks the plausibility of the answers. Interviews are personalized, reducing sources of error in questions and answers and making it difficult to falsify responses. Deeper questions are standardized and complex and logical relationships are checked by computer programs.

Conceptually, CATI systems consist of two servers, a database server and a telephone server. The DB server provides the data of the interviewees and the questions for the interview, in it the answers are checked for plausibility and stored, as well as the log files. The telephone server contains special voice-supporting boards, it manages the telephone connections, it takes care of the connection establishment, the dial-in and the disconnection. In larger call centers with many CATI workstations, these are interconnected via local networks.