Quality is important to any organization which produces a product or service for consumption by its customers. An effective quality control process identifies specifications to which the product or service must conform in order to be of value to the consumer. Once the standards are established, then a system must be designed to ensure that the product or service conforms to these standards. For years, the manufacturing industry has utilized the concept of statistical process control charts. In fact, control charts helped the Japanese become the world leader in quality in the late 70's early 80's. These charts are based upon quality which is defined as "conformance to specifications". Before a product can conform to its specifications, the production process of that product must be "in control". In other words, the units resulting from the process must contain measurements which are in conformance to specifications or within the bounds of reasonable variation. This can also be related to interviewers. Before interviewers can be expected to conform to certain standards, their interviewing process must be in control. Control charts provide the data necessary for management to make and implement the decisions which will bring the process into control. This paper discusses how control charts can be used in the field of survey research to assist in improving data quality and
interviewer productivity.
