DDC Research has conducted hundreds and hundreds of telephone surveys for a wide variety of clients since 1983. We’ve conducted surveys for Federal and local government agencies, national associations and trade groups, private sector companies (large and small), private consultants, universities and many others. Surveys have been completed in the areas of consumer/retail; telecommunications; public health and safety; media/communications; transportation; finance; information technology; community planning; and an almost endless list of other areas. DDC Research maintains a fully equipped state-of-the-art telephone interviewing facility in Fredericksburg, VA. The facility houses enough Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) stations to handle large as well as smaller telephone surveys. DDC’s CATI system utilizes Sawtooth Technologies, WinCati software for conducting interviews, and CATI Help to manage and track interview and interviewer production. DDC’s telephone center maintains FCC-approved monitoring equipment, and remote monitoring capabilities for clients. All DDC Research telephone interviewers undergo an intensive training period prior to working on any survey project. Initially, each interviewer is trained in the basics of research, with concentration being focused on how their role may affect errors and biases in surveys. This is followed by extensive training in proper interviewing techniques, such as the importance of screening for eligible respondents, the art of asking questions exactly as they are worded, the importance of proper recording of responses, techniques for developing rapport with respondents, methods of refusal conversion, how to identify inadequate responses to open-ended questions, and methods of probing to obtain informative, accurate verbatim responses, and so on. Of course, additional project specific training is provided in great detail before each individual telephone survey is initiated. Many of DDC’s telephone surveys are conducted using client provided lists, such as lists of telephone numbers of members of associations, however, about half of all DDC telephone research has been based on methods of Random Digit Dialing or RDD. The quality of RDD based surveys of members of the general public has been questioned by many in recent years. Please see “Current Issues in Data Quality” in another section of this DDC website for information as to how DDC approaches current telephone interviewing data quality.