Call Sheet

A call sheet is a record-keeping form that is used by telephone survey interviewers to keep track of information related to the calls they make to reach survey respondents. As paper-and-pencil interviewing (PAPI) was replaced by computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI), these call sheets moved from being printed on paper to being displayed on the interviewer's computer monitor. The fact that they are named "call sheets" refers to the days when thousands of such call sheets (each one was a piece of paper) were used to control sampling for a single telephone survey.

The information that is recorded on a call sheet—also called "paradata"—captures the history of the various call attempts that are made to a sampled telephone number. Typically these forms are laid out in matrix ...