Face-to-face interviews (CAPI)
CAPI stands for computer-assisted personal interviewing. This is a form of face-to-face interviewing where the interviewer reads the survey questions from a tablet device and inputs the respondent’s answers directly to the device.
This is an ideal approach where you want participants to touch, taste or smell your product before giving quantitative feedback on it. Participants can also be shown prompts – such as videos or audio – allowing a broader range of reactions or opinions to be tested than would be possible over the phone.
Recruitment for CAPI interviews often involves street intercepts, where participants are stopped in a specific, often outdoor, location such as a busy high street and either interviewed on the spot, or taken to a nearby indoor location if the interview involves some form of product testing. By definition, the street intercept approach takes respondents away from whatever they were doing and for this reason the interviews need to be relatively short, ideally no more than 10 to 15 minutes.
If you need to conduct longer face-to-face quantitative interviews then pre-recruitment is an option. Pre-recruitment also makes it possible to implement more complex screening requirements and target profiles that could be hard to recruit in the street due to their patterns of behaviour or relatively low incidence amongst the population.
As with CATI, the key benefits of the CAPI approach include the ability to include complex routing and branching logic in the questionnaire, and real-time data capture allowing the client to monitor progress and obtain the results as soon as the interviews are completed.
RELATED CASE STUDIES
Quantitative research in viewing facility amongst UK beer drinkers
A major beer brand wanted to obtain quantitative feedback on a prototype design for a new draught beer dispenser for use in UK pubs and bars, including A/B testing to find out if the prototype design made beer drinkers more likely to select the client’s brand in preference to competitor brands. We helped the client set up a mock bar in a Central London research facility and recruited 300 respondents to visit the facility over the course of two days and complete the client’s online survey in situ. We also arranged a focus group of bartenders at the facility so the client could obtain their qualitative feedback on the design.
Face-to-face taste testing research in London
Analytical Flavor Systems (AFS) is a US-based predictive analytics company for the consumer packaged goods and food & beverage industries. AFS was carrying out taste tests with large groups in many different countries and due to last-minute schedule changes, FieldworkHub was asked to arrange the groups in London with less than one week’s notice. We recruited 100 taste tasting participants to take part in the first day of testing and helped AFS to select 25 participants from the original group for two more days of testing. We also arranged venues and incentives for all three days and bought in items to be tasted and serving supplies.
London and Birmingham street intercepts for shampoo and conditioner sniff tests
A well-known brand of shampoo and conditioner for women wanted to obtain quantitative feedback on some new product fragrances that it was planning to launch in the UK. FieldworkHub was asked to recruit 200 women via street intercepts in both London and Birmingham (400 women in total). The participants were asked to sniff two products from freshly opened bottles and one product from a Petri dish, completing a short online survey after each test. In screening potential participants for the study we were asked to confirm that they had not eaten, smoked or applied perfume in the past hour, were not pregnant, breast-feeding or suffering from a cold or blocked nose, used shampoo and conditioner at least twice a week and did not reject the brand in question.