Blaise for Windows

Blaise for Windows is a powerful and flexible system for computer assisted survey processing.
It supports telephone interviewing, face to face interviewing and data entry. The system includes methods and utilities for conditional question routing, using multiple languages, coding, looking up data in external files, data manipulation, weighing data, data documentation and for exporting data to external statistical packages or databases.

 

Blaise can perform Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI), Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (CAPI ), Computer Assisted Self-Interviewing (CASI), interactive editing, high-speed data entry, and data manipulation and has full survey management capabilities. With Blaise you can perform various activities in an easy and user-friendly way.

 

Blaise provides a multitude of options and features for the survey developer:

1.Virtually unlimited capacity for extremely large numbers of questions, edits, and hierarchies.
2.Constant enforcement of all appropriate routes and edits.
3.Concurrent interviewing of two or more respondents.
4.Hierarchical, alphabetical, and trigram coding schemes which can be used together.
5.Lookups of information held in external files.
6.Meta data management and manipulation.
7.Data manipulation, re-coding, exporting, and importing.
8.Language switching during interviewing programmed to happen automatically, through menus, or with a keystroke.
9.Question-by-question interview aids within Blaise itself or through WinHelp.
10.Multimedia capability for graphics, video, and audio.
11.Mouse, pen, and touch-screen support.
12.Survey management and reports.
13.Sophisticated CATI call scheduling, including time zone adjustments, interviewer assignments, and time slices to target respondents.
14.Full control of fonts and font sizes for questions, response text, and entry cells.
15.Customisable user interfaces which can be modified for your organisation.
16.An audit trail that can be customised to your own needs.

 

A Control Centre integrates many tools that help the developer produce and test instruments. Blaise can be used for surveys in multiple modes such as CATI and CAPI combined collections.

For interviewers, data entry personnel, and data editors, the interfaces are powerful and elegant and have proven to be very efficient and popular. For methodologists, Blaise allows data to be gathered correctly by using edits during the interview.

 

For high-level managers, Blaise can increase productivity. During instrument development, one system specification handles many tasks. During survey production, data collection, coding, entry, and editing are all combined into one or a few steps.

Subject matter specialists, statisticians, and programmers can become adept at authoring Blaise instruments. The modular and reusable structure of the language allows many surveys to use the same blocks of code with little or no modification. This results in faster, surer development and better comparability between surveys. The multimode nature of Blaise encourages (and can enforce!) consistent specifications and conventions between multiple modes of use.

 

Blaise for Windows is a full 32-bit Windows program, suitable for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP and Windows NT 4.0. The meta and data file structures are compatible with its predecessor, Blaise III. This allows users of previous versions of Blaise to easily shift to Blaise for Windows.