Question

Compare the advantages and disadvantages of person-administered surveys and computer-administered ones? Please provide a real world example of each.

reference:

Burns, A. C., & Bush, R. F. (2012). Basic marketing research (3rd ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Answer 1

Person administered surveys as the name suggests are the ones where human intervention is required to administer the survey. Computer based ones are the ones like online surveys where there is no requirement for an human intervention. Hence, the advantages and disadvantages are there for both kinds.

Person-administered surveys

Advantages:

1) More personalized as there will be a human touch

2) More reliable than online surveys as the respondents are more likely to give correct expected answers

3) Immediate answers to questions can be expected and there will be no lag time

Disadvantages:

1) Time consuming as human intervention is present

2) More effort is spent in understanding and marking the answers

3) Higher cost of labour involved

4) Prone to error as it involves the interpretation of answers by the interviewer also

Examples:

1) Some surveys conducted by food companies to know the result of tasting their product

2) Some surveys conducted by pharma and cosmetic companies to know the result of their products

Computer administered surveys

Advantages:

1) Faster and quicker returns for the money spent as cost

2) Respondents have the flexibility to complete it at their own time and there is no pressure

3) Lesser effort spent by the company/entity creating the survey as everything needs to be filled by the respondent

Disadvantages:

1) No user intervention involved and hence there is a likely chance that the respondents fill it in haste leading to incorrect results

2) Prone to hardware/software failures and online frauds and glitches

3) Need of further software to convert the answers to meaningful outputs

Example:

1) Online surveys conducted by Amazon, Netflix etc

2) Online surveys conducted by banks and credit card companies to get customer feedback