Quantitative methods

PAPI – interviewing with a printed questionnaire

Face-to-face interviewing is an extremely prevailing method in market, media as well as in opinion research. Questionnaires can vary in the different research areas as far as content or language is concerned. Advantage of this method is that – if a representative sample is used – the results are objective and can easily be generalized.

Characteristics of the PAPI method

It is the standard of the face-to-face data collection methods (in international research terminology: Paper and Pen Interviewing). Questionnaires are finished in a printed form and the interviewers complete them with a pen according to the answers of the respondent.

Application of PAPI

  • face-to-face interview,
  • self-completing data collection,
  • diary data collection.

Face-to-face interview

We use face-to-face interviews if the topic of the research requires a deeper, more detailed analysis, but representativity is equally important (e.g. advertising research, satisfaction research, marketing research, media research, youth research, research of politicians’ popularity).

Researches in which the face-to-face method is applied can be classified as:

  • population,
  • corporate or
  • target group research.

If face-to-face interviewing is needed, PAPI has been replaced by methods such as CAPI, CATI or CAWI to an increasingly great extent recently due to the development and spreading of telecommunication and IT techniques.
 

The PAPI system is under the supervision of the Operations department.