Survey Research Centre

Author: Steven McEachern

Published: Thursday 27th Mar 2003

Dr Steven McEachern and Prof Julian Lowe from the Centre for Regional Innovation and Competitiveness within the School of Business have secured an ARC LIEF (Infrastructure) grant in the latest round of ARC funding, in conjunction with Deakin University.

The funding is for the first stage of a project to develop a multi-university collaborative survey research facility, the Australian Survey Research Infrastructure Network (ASRIN). This first component is a pilot project to establish a statewide survey research facility that enables academics throughout Victoria to undertake survey research that is efficient but achieves world best practice technical standards.
 
The Survey Research Center design includes three facilities for computer based surveying:

• CATI (computer-assisted telephone interviewing),
• CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing),
• CADI (computer-assisted data input).

Computer assisted telephone and personal interviewing are now available from the CRIC Survey Research Centre. The facility includes two permanent CATI stations, and mobile survey facilities available for personal interviewing.

The Centre also has access to facilities at other universities through membership in ASRIN. The network hub (with CATI, CAPI and CADI facilities) is based at the Social and Organisational Life Data Archive at Deakin University, while ASRIN's third member is the Australian Centre for Emerging Technologies and Society at Swinburne University. ASRIN aims to achieve geographic coverage of most of the state by the end of 2003. Once the Victorian network is established, and the design prototyped and tested, the collaborative network will be expanded Australia wide.

The benefits of the facility are now available to the University and the wider community. If you or your students are involved in survey research that would benefit from CATI, CAPI or CADI facilities please contact Steven McEachern on (03)5327-9645 or via e-mail at: s.mceachern@ballarat.edu.au