CAPI stands for computer-assisted personal interviewing. This is a form of face-to-face interviewing in which the interviewer reads the survey questions onto a tablet and enters the respondent’s answers directly onto the device.

This approach is ideal when you want participants to touch, taste or smell your product before giving a quantitative opinion about it. It’s also possible to show participants prompts, such as videos or audio files, allowing you to test a wider range of reactions or opinions than over the phone.

Recruitment for CAPI interviews often involves street recruitment, where participants are stopped in a specific location, often outdoors, such as a busy high street, and either interviewed on the spot, or taken to a nearby indoor location if the interview involves some form of product testing. By definition, the street intercept approach takes interviewees away from what they were doing and, for this reason, interviews should be relatively short, ideally no more than 10 minutes.

If you need to conduct longer face-to-face quantitative interviews, pre-recruitment is an option. Pre-recruitment also makes it possible to implement more complex selection criteria and target profiles that would be difficult to recruit on the street due to their behavior or relatively low incidence in the population.

As with CATI, the main advantages of the CAPI approach are the ability to include complex routing and branching logic in the questionnaire, and real-time data capture, enabling the customer to monitor progress and obtain results as soon as interviews are completed.