method or technique of an interview in which interviewers and respondents use computer to answer questions. It is similar to a telephonic interview, though CAPI method is more preferred than a telephonic interview. This type of interviews is mainly concise and coding is involved. Nowadays CAPI software is been used for a b2b conversations. It could be argued that a more sensitive method of collecting this sort of information would have been in-depth interviews, which could then have been analyzed using qualitative research methods.
CAPI claims to enhance the research in many ways,
- Elimination of routing problem within questionnaire.
- Questions are customized correctly.
- Ability to spot inadmissible or inconsistent responses that could be the result of either interviewer or respondent error.
- As CAPI interviewers enter data directly into a computer, the separate process of data entry, familiar in paper and pencil surveys, is unnecessary.
Though the CAPI produces quality services, but it includes some disadvantages. Like,
- CAPI will always be more expensive due to the time needed to convert paper questionnaires to a computer version as the initial cost to conduct this technique is expensive.
- Here comes the question about the ability and awareness of the interviewers to handle the computer.
- Sometime answers are predetermined, coding based, so it makes a gap between the given answer and the answer which was actually thought by the interviewers.
In spite of these shortfalls CAPI is one of the most popular methods of interviewing in present time. An alternative method of that paper-pencil method, it has proved to be more useful with proper and scientific way to deal with a huge dataset.
