Okay. Let's move on to telephone surveys. Telephone surveys are often used for quantitative research because you have good phone surveyors and you want to ensure that real people answer your questions. Almost everyone has access to a phone today so it would seem as though getting people to answer would be easy. In fact, many people do not answer their phone. Most people rely on voicemail to handle their phone messages electronically. But when it comes to doing phone interviews, a phone interviewer rarely leaves a message. The key is moving fast through your call list and going back to those who did not answer their phone in the first place, to see if you might luck out and get them on the phone at a different time. Phone surveys can be conducted by a live person or using automation. Automation is usually only used if there are one or two questions. If you want to leave a good impression, it is always best to have a live person on the phone who addresses you personally, is upbeat and cordial. Even though automated voice calling has improved substantially and is sounding more human and becoming more interactive over the years, many people have a negative impression of them due to the rise of unwanted robocalling advertisements. Some key considerations when designing a phone survey are to: include an upbeat introduction, the questions and a thank you wrap at the end of the survey; pretest your questionnaire on 10 respondents; describe what the benefit is for the person being interviewed to answer the survey, what is their investment and how will it pay off ideally for them. Either purchase a random list of potential respondents, do random digit dialing or have a list that is non-randomized like you would do for physician interviews. Hire someone you can trust or do the analysis yourself. When considering the budgeting for conducting phone surveys, you should consider, first of all, hiring your phone interviewers. I usually pay by the interview rather than by the hour because some people are really slow at completing them. One problem that you could potentially run into is that you may find someone who makes up the data from the interview just so they complete more interviews, thus, getting paid more. One time, I even had an interviewer who sat at his desk in my phone room drinking coffee and making calls. He sat there all day for eight hours and turned in a stack of completed interviews. Luckily, I chose to enter the data myself on some of them and found a very odd pattern to the responses he gathered. Their survey was a quality of life survey. So the questions ranged from, "On an average day, how often can you get out of the bed?" all the way up to, "On an average day, how often can you run 10 miles?" Well, oddly enough, the ones that could run 10 miles couldn't get out of the bed. This interviewer had made up all the surveys. I obviously didn't pay him. He sat on the phone pretending to make calls. What a waste of time. In that particular instance, in order to meet the expectations of the client, I had to do all of the interviews myself to stay within the designated timeline. The lesson here is to thoroughly question and vet your phone interviewers to the point that you know that you can trust them to do the job and make sure to get their references. As with online surveys, delivering a quantitative survey by phone, of course, comes with strengths and weaknesses. The strengths are, you know that you actually received the responses from the person interviewed because you or your interviewer heard the responses. You can hear intonations in voice and people may expand on the answers to give flavor to the interview. You are in control of the questions and the respondents. The weaknesses are, your interviewers can make or break the interview. If they are a bad interviewer, the respondent may hang up on them and you could lose that interview. It is much more time consuming than using the online method. People may not be home. You have to make at least five calls to a person before you delete them from your active list. Telephone surveys are a mainstay in market research. Though people talk about being irritated by them, the response rate is still quite high. Once you get people to agree to participate, if you are a good interviewer, the respondent tends not to worry about the time it takes to complete the interview.