HSRC Services

Below are list of services HSRC offers. You can click on home of services for more details. Check back soon for more updates. For more information feel free to contact us directly at: hsrc@umn.edu

Services

Study estimating, planning, and development
Question and questionnaire development
Survey design and development
Database development
Data collection
- Telephone interviews
- Mailed surveys
- Face-to-face interviews
- Web surveys (Internet)
Data collection in Spanish and English
Coding of open-ended response data
Data entry and verification
Basic data analysis, survey consultation, and advisory services
Forms design
Centrally supervised telephone surveying
Project/study consultation
Participant recruitment and retention
Tracking participants lost to
follow-up
Sample selection
Grant level estimates
Survey instrument development
Program evaluation technology
RDD (Random Digit Dialing)
Study recruitment and script development
Medical records requests
Process/results monitoring and quality control
Study leadership
Combinations of these services for complex projects/studies

Telephone Interviews

HSRC utilizes a variety of tools and techniques for phone interviewing data collection. Our phone interviews vary from brief, 2-3 minute phone follow-ups to more extensive, 1-2 hour-long survey interviews. Some of our phone interviews are completed on paper surveys. Some are conducted using an Internet survey tool. And, some are completed with Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) technology on a UNIX server.

We work hard to meet the needs and adjust to the time constraints of our participants. Therefore, we conduct phone interviews 7 days a week at times ranging from 7am to 9pm. We offer appointments and also conduct on-the-spot interviews. Additionally, we are happy to break the phone interviews into smaller time segments, as participants may request or require. Flexibility and convenience help us to maximize the number of participants we reach and the number of phone interviews we complete.

Our interviewers are trained on all interviewing tools and technology. They are also trained on all study-specific survey protocol. Interviewers take direct verbatim on paper during all phone interviews. And, they are quality checked consistently throughout their employment with HSRC. These quality checks verify written verbatim with data-entered response fields. The checks ensure adherence to all study protocol and provide opportunity for constructive feedback.

Data collection in Spanish
HSRC also retains some staff, trained and able to conduct phone interviews in Spanish. Our Spanish-speaking interviewers can conduct very brief over-the-phone contacts as well as more complex interviews of an hour or more.

Mailed Surveys

HSRC requires a minimum of 2 weeks preparation time prior to a mailing. Preparation includes develop a mailing timeline (working with the Principal Investigator's needs), order mailing supplies and material incentives (Principal Investigator's staff orders monetary incentives), assemble mailings, and send them out. HSRC then collects returned mailing items, and logs all responses into either an electronic log or paper logging system.
We keep all mailing items with personal information or monetary value locked up and secure when not being worked on.

A base model Survey Mailing Process for a three-step mailing scenario:

Basic Mailing Schedule:

Mail survey with Cover Letter, Business Reply Envelope (BRE) and incentive
2 weeks later Mail postcard (used as a reminder and/or thank you)
2 weeks later Mail second survey with cover letter and BRE (send to non-responders)

Assembly:

Prepare Outbound Envelopes and BREs with postal service stamps, color-coded HSRC stamps and address label. We use different postal services depending on the study (i.e. address service requested, return service requested).
Minneapolis Post Office Mailing Requirements: (612) 349-4721.
Label surveys with study IDs. Keep in order of study ID.
Put materials into the outbound envelope, facing the back flap, so that we can see the cover letter and incentive as we pull materials out of the opened envelope. Place materials in this order:
1. Cover Letter (we implement suggestions from Don A. Dillman (2000) Mail and Internet Surveys whenever possible)
2. Survey in ready to read position
3. BRE fold the BRE in half with the back flap inside. Fold the BRE in an upright position, around the center of the survey, on the left side.
4. Keep all stuffed envelopes in study ID order for Quality Assurance check.
5. Do not seal the envelope

Quality Assurance:

HSRC does a quality check on all mailings. This entails checking every 10th envelope (or the frequency determined by the Principal Investigator) and seeing that the letter, survey and labels have the correct name, address and study ID. Also making sure that the stamps, colors, postage, and contents are assembled per instructions. If an error does arise, we check each envelope forward and backward from the original error until we find no more errors- this is done in groups of 10 (or the frequency determined by the Principal Investigator). Then we proceed to correct all errors found. After the quality check is complete, all envelopes can be sealed and mailed.

Web Surveys (Internet)

HSRC offers web-based surveying. The Internet survey program we use allows for great flexibility in formatting and design. We can customize the layout to your needs.

Internet-based surveying offers some unique advantages:

Data is entered directly into the database by the survey respondent.
We can email your participants:
Unlike paper surveys, we can program “skips” into the web-based survey so that participants only see the questions they are meant to see.

Our Internet survey tool can be used in differing ways:

Participants can login and complete the survey on their own.
HSRC interviewers can call the participants and complete the survey over the phone.
We can program screeners to determine participants’ eligibility for your studies.
Our tool can be used as a web-accessible database.
We can setup a fidelity measurement and/or monitoring system.

Our tool allows for several levels of security:

Anonymous: If specific participants are unknown, an anonymous setup allows anyone to access the survey as long as they have the URL.
Authenticated: With a specific participant list, participants are assigned a unique, random password. Each password can only be used once to complete the survey, so there is no risk of the same person completing it multiple times.

Participant Recruitment and Retention

HSRC specializes in the recruitment and retention of a wide variety of study participant cohorts. Some study recruitment is done via phone contact and some through the mail. We follow study-specific scripted protocols when recruiting over the phone. And, we are able to accommodate a variety of study-approved mailings to our participants. We mail recruitment letters, follow-up letters and survey materials. We also mail postcards and incentives when requested by study PIs and coordinating staff.

During study recruitment phases, we offer a wide variety of phone appointment times, both day and evening, 7 days a week. We have recruited for study clinic exams; setting and re-scheduling appointments on a daily basis. We also handle studies of varying duration. Some studies field only a few months while others are on-going for many years. Our longitudinal studies rely heavily on our retention experience and technique.

We work on a widely diverse range of health research studies and are able to recruit and retain even the most challenging populations. HSRC has extensive experience tracking transient populations. We track manually, using a variety of Internet-assisted search engines. We also coordinate batch tracking to an outside organization for larger sample sizes. Our longitudinal studies require on-going tracking to improve and ensure high retention of these populations. We send multi-annual mailings to these participants to help maintain accurate address databases for future contacts.