Telephone Speech Collection



			Telephone Speech Collection How to Conduct a Telephone Speech Collection Effort: 1) Determine that the Human Subjects Committee at PENN has all necessary paperwork regarding the study you wish conduct and has approved of the study before you begin recording subject's voices. this may include sending copies of recruitment materials this will include listing the number of subjects you wish to use, and their gender, age, and ethnicity. 2) Finalize as many of the study's parameters with the grant sponsors prior to recruitment. Questions to ask the sponsors include: How many calls do you want to collect and in what language? How long should each call be? How many subjects do you want participating in the conversations? What age group? How educated? What about gender balance? Raised Where? How quickly do you want the calls collected? What types of phones (handset variation) are you interested in? How many minutes should be audited? Will the calls be transcribed? How much should we pay the participants for their contribution? 3) Of course, many of these questions will be answered by the LDC and the sponsors together. It is always a good idea to make recommendations based on past experiences with Switchboard-2, CallFriend, and CallHome. For example, it is always easier to collect calls in languages other than English if you allow international calls rather than domestic. The LDC should always let the sponsors know what recruitment and collection tactics did not work well in the past as well as those that were successful. 4) Once the parameters for collection have been determined, a recruitment plan needs to be drawn up. This will include: determining how many people to hire for recruitment and auditing, when the best time to start the collection will be, where and how to recruit the participants, and how early to recruit the subjects. It is always wise to allow yourself at least one month to recruit the total number of participants needed for your study. They can then begin to participate while you continue to recruit more people if necessary. Finding subjects is easiest when you have a large enough budget for newspaper advertisements. It is a good idea to run ads in several papers with a wide circulation. The ads should be large (1/4 or 1/2 page) and should run for multiple days in the same paper. Recruitment materials (flyers, newspaper ads, and email postings MUST all say that the conversations will be recorded for research and educational purposes posting flyers around college campuses or in international stores is an easy and inexpensive way to recruit people 5) While the recruitment plan is being created and implemented, it is important to make sure the recruitment interface will be ready before people call in to register. This interface should be tested out extensively before being used for the study to make sure that all information fits within each field, that all necessary fields are present, and that the information saves properly. The fields are: first name, last name, gender, age, education, birth country, raised in, social security number, street, apt, city, state, country, zip code, home phone, work phone, fax, email address, payment, and comments. a PIN will be generated automatically each time a person is registered 6) Testing the collection platform prior to the actual collection start date is important. After the prompts have been recorded in the appropriate language, several people should make test calls to ensure that the prompts are easy to hear and understand and to make sure that the recording process works well and that all information is saved in the database correctly. 7) The registration process is fairly straightforward. Potential participants contact the LDC via our 1-800 line or via email after having seen one of our advertisements. There are several things that each potential participant must be told: calls will be recorded for research and educational purposes names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, ss#'s are kept confidential and will not be released with the recorded data how to make and receive calls how much and when they will get paid when the study begins and ends (always explain that a study may end early if we have received the number of necessary calls sooner than anticipated) 8) After someone has registered for the study, a set of detailed instructions should be sent to him/her. The instructions should explain, once again, everything that was said during the registration process (#6 above). The instructions should also list the PIN to be used as well as run through the series of prompts that will be heard. 9) Auditing will begin once a sufficient number of calls have come in. If auditing for Switchboard-2, it is critical that each call associated with a particular PIN be the same voice. For all projects, auditing includes: language identification (target language or not?) gender identification degree of echo present background noise channel distortion comments field allowing for explanations or remarks about the call 10) Participants should never be paid before their call(s) has been audited. Once the auditor has accepted a call, it is appropriate to pay the participant. Payment paperwork is sent to accounts payable several times a week. Participants should be sent over in batches with the list containing names in alphabetical order with the social security number and the amount to be paid. The file should look like this: Miller, David 123-45-6789 $20 3615 Market Street Suite 200 Philadelphia, PA 19104 The file containing the information about each person is accompanied by a C-368 form as well as a cover letter from the LDC explaining that these are participants in a telephone speech study. The LDC should always keep a xeroxed copy of all paperwork that is sent to accounts payable. This is valuable for two reasons: (1) accounts payable may lose the paperwork and (2) participants will call and want to know when their paperwork was sent over.
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