Catglobe reviewed

?It may seem as if we are spoilt for choice with data collection software packages, but if you are looking for a multimodal interviewing solution that is also web-based, the choice is relatively narrow – especially if web-based CATI is part of the mix. So it’s good to welcome a new entrant on the scene in the guise of Catglobe, a mixed-mode interviewing system offered as a SaaS (software as a service) product by the software division of the Danish fieldwork company Catinet.

Software as a service
The SaaS model makes it very easy to get started with little infrastructure in-house – all that is needed is a reasonable internet connection and a web browser. It is not fussy about which one: Firefox on Windows or Mac, or Internet Explorer on Windows works equally well.

Catglobe is a surprisingly vast system, and the fact that it has been extensively road-tested by Catinet’s in-house fieldwork team is evident in the range of capabilities and options provided. There different modules for sampling, questionnaire authoring, fieldwork management, reporting and some report automation. The interviewing module supports CATI, laptop CAPI and CAWI and even has a special Hall Test mode for a temporary local network of interviewing stations. All of these modules are accessed from a central home page through a pop-up menu similar to the Windows start button.

One database rules all
Behind all of this is a single relational database that holds all of the assets or resources relating to your surveys – questionnaires, survey responses, respondents or panellists, interviewers, reports and so on. This is one of those advanced systems that moves you away from rigid boundaries of the survey to define how data is organised. The concept of the survey still exists – but more as a workflow concept. The system presents the surveys you have available to work on as a folder structure, which you can model as you wish. However, in the background, all the survey does is provide a convenient organising view of the central data repository. Questions and response data from one survey are easily accessible from others, if you can make a connection through questions or respondents in common. This opens up endless possibilities for using your data more intelligently both in sampling and in analysis, and it makes the logistics of running one or more panels really simple.

Ask the panel
Panel management is an area Catglobe handles particularly well. At the sample selection stage, there is a wonderful tool for building ‘groups’ – which are effectively a database query. You use a group to pull a sample from the respondent database. However, this is a query tool that understands concepts such as key demographics, sample frames, frequency of previous response and interviewer resting rules. It then ties in seamlessly with the ‘communications’ module that serves invitations and reminders for web surveys. These work directly from a library of templates, so it is very quick to set up an invitation from an existing and adapt it slightly for the survey. The system is fully multilingual, so invitations can be templated in several languages then dispatched in the appropriate one for each respondent. As it is also truly multimodal, samples can be drawn for CATI or CAWI in parallel. The workflow is well-designed, so it is not only quick to run through the process from end to end, but also flexible when changes are needed, or if the sample requires a boost part-way through the fieldwork.

Panel recruitment works equally well, and there is considerable scope to automate this, including ongoing top-up recruitment. Recruitment can be by web or by telephone, and a phone recruit can be used to trigger an immediate web survey invitation for new panellists to complete their profile data. There is also an elaborate points allocation and redemption capability too, if you wish to incentivise your panel.

The human factor
Access to surveys and functionality is managed from the human resources module, which allows you to define roles and allocate individuals to roles. Respondents and panellists are treated in the same way: everyone from the system administrator to the panel member is registered as a user and has usage rights associated with them.

The majority of the system has a very cohesive appearance, which is simple to follow – it passes the test of deceiving you that you are using a desktop program, when in fact it is a browser-based web app. At the bottom of the screen are two buttons – one labelled Tools, which is the ‘start’ button that gets you to all the different modules; the other is the Folders button, which takes you to a tree view of folders containing surveys, questionnaires, templates – essentially all your data.

The editing process
The questionnaire editor has a somewhat different feel, and is not as well-crafted as the other modules. It does provide pretty much all of what you need, but it feels clumsy to use. You can view a list of the questions, but important details, such as the answers, can’t be seen without going into the question itself. There is no overview of the logic or routing, which makes life difficult for the scripter. There is a powerful scripting language available, and parts of the questionnaire created in the GUI can be exported out into this too, which makes writing it (and learning it) much easier. This is an excellent capability. Unfortunately you are likely to need it more than you should if writing web or CATI interviews of even a medium level of complexity, such as creating a constrained sum set of questions. Really, more options should be built into the questionnaire editor.

Also on the downside, actual users have reported sluggish performance with some of the database operations such as drawing sample or exporting results once the number of records is in the hundreds of thousands – though Catinet report that they have worked to improve this. The reporting capabilities are also unlikely to meet most users’ needs at present – there are some nice features there, but Catinet have ambitious development plans for the reporting side, so this is likely to be improved over the current year.

Client perspective: Olafur Thor Gylfason, Market and Media Research, Reykjavik

?MMR moved to Catglobe a year ago in order to move to a single interviewing platform for CATI, CAPI and web interviewing replacing a range of different packages. As Olafur explains: “The good thing is we have been able to use this platform for everything we do from CATI recruiting of panels to CATI phone interviews, CAPI and CAWI.

“There is a powerful programming language within the software so when we do complicated surveys such as international surveys, where you have to produce an exact data map afterwards, we can write the data handling programs in advance, so that when the survey is finished we can export the data in the exact format the client
requires straight away. With this programming language there is nothing you can’t do with the software, provided you have a little bit of programming experience.

“Another positive thing about the software is that we use it for open-ended coding and this capability is very powerful – we can do this on the fly so that the turnaround time on projects can be reduced considerably.

“We use it for CATI recruiting, and once the phone phase is completed, the automated CAWI questionnaire is sent out immediately, and everything is always interlinked so it is very good for us.

“With panel management, there are two key points. Firstly, because it is completely multimodal all recruitment is done by phone and recruits are immediately served a web survey to complete their profile. Everything happens at the same time. Secondly, their sampling is very easy to work with. It makes sure there is the right load across the sample and making sure that panellists get the right number of invitations, keeping track of invitations and reminders. Their ‘group builder’ is very powerful and very easy to use and the communicator, which is the email part of the system, links in with the group builder.

“We have run into some problems, but the support has been excellent – they are almost acting as a division within our company when it comes to support, so you forget about the bad things very quickly.”