• Roybal Center for Financial Decisionmaking
• About Roybal
  • What We Do
  • Methodology/Research
  • Center Staff
• American Life Panel
• MMIC
• MMIC/ALP Request Form
• Client Satisfaction Survey

RAND Roybal Center for Financial Decision Making

MMIC - Multimode Interviewing Capability

What's MMIC™?

MMIC™ (Multimode Interviewing Capability) is a comprehensive information system under development by RAND, building on work by CentERdata in The Netherlands. MMIC™ integrates various traditional modes of collecting interview data, including telephone interviewing, self-administered surveys, and personal interviewing. MMIC™ is used to manage the whole data collection process from questionnaire design, sample management, and fieldwork monitoring to final dataset production.

The Value of MMIC™

In the development of MMIC™ we concentrated heavily on self-administered surveys using the Internet. We have new, powerful software available to program questionnaires, including visual displays and visual aides. Using the Internet opens up other possibilities, including real time availability of results and the use of alternative technology for interviewing, allowing respondents to participate using devices like PDAs, Smart phones and WebTVs from virtually anywhere in the world. The use of these devices enables new data collection methods such as medical measurements of blood pressure and heart rate at random intervals. MMIC™ supports the collection of such data.

Hosting of Questionnaires

Researchers interested in using the MMIC™ capability need not necessarily familiarize themselves with MMIC™ in one form or other. One can also 'outsource' the whole process of questionnaire programming and Internet interviewing, by having RAND host a questionnaire on its server. The questionnaire can be given any layout and 'feel' desired by the researcher.

Advantages of MMIC™ over other software packages

MMIC™ is designed to overcome many of the limitations inherent in existing survey processing suites, particularly for the kind of large-scale CATI/CAPI questionnaires that are currently being fielded. In addition, substantially reduced development times result from a full-featured set of programming tools and from the greatly expanded set of debugging features available in MMIC™. As a consequence, greater accuracy and responsiveness to the needs of the researchers can be obtained and programming overhead can be reduced.

Features of MMIC™

MMIC™ is a new product, bypassing the shortcomings of existing packages and adding new functionality. MMIC™ supports two programming interfaces. The first, a (normal) top down programming structure, is built on a programming language that includes objects and integrates easy programming tools like a debugger and a variable viewer. The MMIC™ programming language allows users to add descriptions to all items in the language, including questions and enumerated answer types. MMIC™ also supports easy ways to simplify the randomization for questions and answer categories.

The second interface implements a web or graphical user interface to program simple questionnaires without complicated routing. This visual questionnaire builder is intended to put greater control directly in the hands of researchers as well as an improved environment for translation work. MMIC™ will also provide extensive built-in non-Western language support. Metadata support for MMIC™ includes tools to facilitate the rapid production of human-readable representations of the instrument for review and documentation, which otherwise are very time-consuming to produce for a large survey. Perhaps most importantly, MMIC™ offers comparatively better data extraction capabilities than other packages. These include the ability to easily move data, along with corresponding metadata, directly into current statistical analysis packages such as STATA.

MMIC™ is open source

Due to the fact that much of the MMIC™ program code will be available for modification and continued development by users, MMIC™ promises to be more flexible than existing packages and has much greater potential to adapt to future changes in the needs of survey research.

MMIC™ integrates the layout of the questionnaire with the metadata and exports to a uniform central (meta) database. Data entry programs and a sample management system for all modes are included as well as support for survey control utilities.

Furthermore, there are (advanced) plans to include tools in MMIC™ for metadata viewing, generating codebooks and exporting well-documented files of the survey responses that are ready to load into STATA and other statistical analysis software, or spreadsheet/database programs.

Hardware and software requirements for MMIC™

MMIC™ is platform (and hardware) independent. It can be run on any device that can run a java virtual machine such as laptops with Linux or Windows or even PDAs.

Although MMIC™ is still under development, it is already being used in a number of applications, including Internet interviewing in the RAND projects and the fielding of a large scale survey in 12 countries with 17 different languages and 5 different scripts (including Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew). In general, MMIC™ is capable of handling both alphabet and character based languages.

Additional survey design resources at RAND

In addition to the use of MMIC™ software for programming and hosting surveys, RAND Survey Research Group can provide consultation on overall survey design and questionnaire wording and layont. RAND SRG works with the MMIC™ platform to ensure that you have the best possible survey design to fit your needs.

Download the MMIC Brochure

For additional information