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New Survey Research Center will gather data for faculty in all disciplines

By David J. Craig

As a COM researcher working on a study about consumer satisfaction with word processing software in 1993, Michel Elasmar needed to conduct a large telephone survey to gauge consumer attitudes. Because he didn't have the necessary facilities or staff, he looked to an off-campus marketing firm to do the job.

"My research team was faced with having to trust the integrity, quality, and cost estimates of for-profit commercial vendors, whose objectives were very different from ours," says Elasmar, a COM associate professor, who now directs COM's Communication Research Center. "It was inconvenient, and we had no way of guaranteeing that the data would be collected in a manner consistent with the basic principles of science."

	Michel Elasmar, director of BU's Communication Research Center, says the center's new Survey Research Center will administer large-scale telephone surveys for BU faculty members in all disciplines more objectively than off-campus marketing firms. Photo by Fred Sway

BU researchers no longer have to hire off-campus companies to complete large surveys, however, as COM recently created the Survey Research Center to gather data by telephone, the Web, and mail.

The center is well suited to assist researchers in any discipline, according to Elasmar, because its expertise is in data collection and measurement, and is not content-specific. "Disciplines that traditionally have made use of survey research include medicine, health, psychology, political science, and all of the social sciences," he says. "Ours is a multidisciplinary center."

The Survey Research Center can implement three types of surveys: telephone, Web, and mail. It includes a telephone interviewing facility with 33 permanent computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) stations (expandable to 50 stations). The center's staff ensures quality by supervising interviews through audio, video, and computer screen monitoring.

The center also features technology for administering controlled Web surveys, which involve inviting members of a carefully selected sample to answer questions online. Respondents to Web surveys require an identification number and password to access the survey, which appears on a Web site hosted by the center.

Launched last September, the Survey Research Center is one of several new units of the Communication Research Center, which underwent a $500,000 revamp in 1999. It makes use of the Communication Research Center's staff and facilities at 704 Commonwealth Ave., which include state-of-the-art telephone and Internet surveying tools.

Working in close conjunction with the Survey Research Center is another new unit of the Communication Research Center, the Focus Group Lab, which can be used for pretesting survey questionnaires and completing in-depth interviews with survey respondents. The lab consists of a conference room, an observation room for watching focus group interactions, video and audio recording equipment, and a kitchen for catering.

A key advantage to using the Survey Research Center as opposed to an off-campus facility, according to Elasmar, is that faculty members can easily visit the center to ensure that their survey is being implemented the way they want. Researchers can even monitor the telephone interviewing process remotely, from their office telephones.

"Because the Survey Research Center is not profit-motivated, it is not going to bumble one project just to take on another," Elasmar says. "We're an academic enterprise motivated to advance science, not to make a large profit for shareholders."

In addition, money that researchers would otherwise be spending off campus for data collection stays on campus and benefits the University community. The costs of the Survey Research Center's services are transferred from its client's research grants to the center.

Elasmar also notes that because the Survey Research Center carefully selects its interviewers from among BU undergraduates, they are of higher caliber than most full-time interviewers employed at for-profit survey centers.

"The for-profit centers don't have access to interviewers like ours. When these students graduate, they don't take jobs administering telephone surveys," he says. "They become engineers, doctors, and lawyers."

Elasmar says that while he expects most faculty members who use the Survey Research Center will want his staff only to administer their survey, the center also can create questionnaires, analyze data, and assist researchers in other ways in developing measurement tools.

"If we don't have the expertise that someone is looking for within our offices, we will certainly be able to direct them to someone on campus who does have it," he says. "In fact, the center now is developing a think tank for issues related to survey methodology. We hope to be a hub for putting researchers in touch with one another when their areas of expertise can contribute to solving one another's problems."

For more information about the Survey Research Center, contact Michel Elasmar at 358-1300 or visit http://crc.bu.edu.

8 February 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations