Field Work

Field work encompasses the tasks that field staff, such as field interviewers or telephone interviewers, perform before or during the data collection field period of a survey. Field work refers to both telephone and in-person studies. For telephone interviewing, field work is usually restricted to the field period. For in-person studies, field work may take place before, during, and after the field period for the study.

The field work for telephone studies usually involves working at a telephone survey center with computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) stations. In RDD (random-digit dialing) surveys, the computer at the CATI station dials randomly generated telephone numbers that are programmed into the CATI system. Given that the telephone numbers are randomly generated, part of the telephone interviewer's field work is to ...