Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and the Virtual Computer-Assisted Telephone Interview (CATI) Facility

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) refers to realtime telecommunication using the Internet to carry the digitized versions of the voices that are speaking to each other. The world of telecommunications has been turned on its ear in the past few years with VoIP telephony challenging the regional telephone companies as broadband connections provided by cable TV [Page 951]vendors penetrate the market. This technological change has the potential to be a force to redesign computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) and multi-modal survey interviewing efforts. For example, starting in 2002, the Center for Human Resource Research (CHRR) at Ohio State University began implementing such a redesign.

A number of survey organizations have converted their office phone systems to VoIP using large, well-established vendors of proprietary systems. These systems tend ...