Paper and Pencil
In the case of paper and pencil surveys, respondents receive a paper questionnaire they complete in their own handwriting and send back to Vocatus in a pre-paid, pre-addressed envelope.
Since paper and pencil surveys (unlike telephone surveys or online surveys) offer only very rudimentary options in terms of filtering, each respondent typically has to answer all the subsequent questions regardless of their previous responses. This means that questionnaire design assumes all the more importance so that one can nonetheless obtain all the necessary results with a manageable questionnaire.
As a result of the greater time and effort required, paper and pencil surveys are these days usually only conducted if the target group cannot easily be reached in any other way. Surveys are frequently conducted in parallel both online and on paper if, for example, in the case of large staff surveys, only some of the target group have access to the Internet.
Vocatus creates a computer-readable paper version of the online questionnaire so that modern scanner software can be used to automatically evaluate comprehensive paper and pencil surveys without manual transfer that may lead to errors. Data that has been gathered online and offline is then merged in a data pool and jointly evaluated. This common survey environment makes it very simple to bring together data from different channels.