In order to produce its surveys, Istat works in collaboration with citizens, institutions and enterprises that constitute the survey units.
Depending on the phenomenon to be surveyed, the Institute may send the questionnaire by post, conduct telephone or direct interviews, make use of the administrative archives, when these are available, in order to reduce the statistical burden placed on respondents. For several years, in order to provide a better service to the country and optimise data collection operations, automation processes have been implemented which bring benefits in terms of speed, quality and costs of statistical production.
In surveys of households, who are usually contacted by telephone or directly, the Institute increasingly makes use of assisted computer-based techniques, which makes it possible to reduce human error during the data collection phase and ensure ongoing quality control. For surveys of enterprises and institutions data capture techniques via Internet have been fully incorporated into production of official statistics, increasing the speed and quality of information produced.
A unified, safe web environment dedicated to the functions of electronic data acquisition has been available to respondents for a number of years now, and is accessible at the address https://indata.istat.it, which hosts the electronic questionnaires of several surveys of enterprises or institutions in the National Statistics Programme, to be filled in onlineor offline. Responding electronically is generally optional: respondents may fill in the paper form if they prefer.
For direct surveys which use the traditional technique, i.e. forms filled in on paper, Istat works with the local municipal statistics departments, which in turn select and train their own enumerators to send to households or enterprises; for direct surveys which use computer-assisted data collection, i.e. an electronic questionnaire on a laptop computer, Istat uses enumerators. Finally, with regard to telephone surveys, Istat uses the services of external call centres, although in many cases it provides them with all of the software necessary to conduct the interviews in order to optimise the quality of the data collected.
The enumerator's visit or call is always preceded by a letter from Istat's president or the mayor of the municipality.
In order to assist respondents, Istat makes all information about surveys available online in Italian language only: questionnaires, survey forms, memoranda and other documents on how to fill in and return the questionnaires.
