Topic (iv): Impact of new technologies on statistical data editing IMMEDIATE QUALITY CHECKS OF OUTPUT PRICES USING THE BLAISE-MODULE FOR COMPUTER-ASSISTED TELEPHONE INTERVIEWING

Statistics Belgium set up an outbound call centre for the collection of output prices by way of computer-assisted telephone interviewing; the software used is the CATI-module of Blaise. Telephone interviewing was chosen because it allows very rapid data collection, which is crucial for output prices information. Another limiting factor for data availability, however, is the time and effort spent in checking for errors. Blaise-CATI can solve this problem: newly introduced prices can immediately be evaluated against other information and, when falling outside preset boundaries, be verified with respondents still on line. A practically error-free input can be guaranteed this way. The present paper explains how automatic quality checking of input is implemented in the Statistics Belgium application of Blaise-CATI for collecting output prices and how these can be used to efficiently calculate output price indices, required by the Eurostat regulation for short-term statistics.