CSRS performs extensive quality control checks on worked performed in all departments.

Draft questionnaires are reviewed by the CSRS data collection manager and other CSRS personnel prior to project start to determine if any question wording, answer categories, question order, skip instructions, or quota specifications are unclear or potentially incorrect.  If desired, CSRS will complete pretest interviews and provide a briefing to our client on issues discovered during the pretest.

For telephone CATI projects and web based survey projects, CSRS is committed to avoiding virtually all questionnaire design errors.    A team approach is utilized to avoid errors

In addition to the dedicated programmer, numerous other CSRS staff members are also responsible for quality control.   Management staff reviews the programmed CATI or web based questionnaire on a question by question basis against the final paper questionnaire.  This review looks for wording errors, answer category errors, wording order errors, skip pattern errors, and quota errors.  When appropriate this check is done on both the Spanish and English version of the programmed questionnaire.

CSRS conducts ongoing quality control monitoring of the work of all interviewers.   This random quality control monitoring is done not only for relatively new research interviewers but for long term interviewers as well.   Following each monitored interview, the CSRS research supervisory meets privately with the interviewer who has been monitored to discuss aspects of the monitored interview and to point out any procedural errors, style errors or verbal errors.  Interviewers who do not improve after ongoing feedback and additional training are removed from the project and if the situation warrants it, they are removed from our staff of interviewers.

In the Data Processing department, CSRS strives to deliver tabulations and data files that meet the needs of our clients.  CSRS maintains on-going communication with our client regarding requirements.   In addition, CSRS will pro-actively involve our clients in data processing (including data editing and cleaning) and coding decisions and we look to our clients to respond to our requests for clarifications in a timely manner.

CSRS runs all gathered/collected data through an extremely rigid cleaning program which thoroughly checks for three main principles; logic, consistency and permissible data options and/or congruency.  All data processing deliverables are reviewed by both the programmer and their supervisor and checked back to the original data source for accuracy.  We work closely with our clients to make sure that data is cleaned to the specifications that our client provides or we will write our own cleaning specifications and then get our client’s approval on them.