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.
