40+ Economies.
Six Continents.
Adapted Method.

CAPI is the right method whenever the population you need to reach is underrepresented on online panels. That includes most rural, lower-income, and informal-economy respondents across Africa, parts of South Asia, frontier Latin America, and Central Asia. Even in markets with growing online panel coverage like Indonesia, Vietnam, or Nigeria, the panels skew urban and middle-class. If your study sample needs to reflect the actual population of the country, CAPI either replaces or supplements the online sample.

Standard conjoint and Van Westendorp instruments assume stable reference prices. In Argentina, Turkey, Egypt, Nigeria, or Pakistan, that assumption breaks. SIS shortens field windows so the entire sample completes within a stable pricing envelope, anchors price points to common transactional benchmarks rather than absolute currency values, and where appropriate uses USD or relative-spend formulations. The discussion guide also probes the mental reference price respondents are using — which is often months out of date.

Yes. Informal-economy research happens through in-store intercepts at traditional retail (corner shops, open-air markets, kiosks), observational ethnography of shopper behavior, and recruited interviews with informal sector workers and small business owners. SIS field teams operate in the same environments where the transactions occur. This is structurally different from online panel work and requires local enumerators who know how to enter, observe, and elicit candid responses in those settings.

Timelines depend on the method, the country, and the respondent profile. A consumer CAWI study in a market with strong panel coverage (Mexico, Poland, the Philippines) can field within two to three weeks. CAPI studies requiring rural fieldwork in markets like Ethiopia, Bangladesh, or rural Nigeria typically take four to eight weeks including enumerator deployment. B2B niche recruitment in frontier markets — sourcing senior decision-makers in Vietnamese manufacturing or Saudi healthcare — can extend to six to ten weeks.

Data quality protocols are layered. Recruitment-stage verification confirms respondent identity and screening criteria. Mid-field quality checks flag straight-lining, inconsistent answers, and impossibly fast completion times. Translation back-checks ensure instruments mean the same thing across languages. For multi-country studies, we apply scale-use correction techniques to account for cultural response style differences (acquiescence bias is much higher in some markets than others) so that cross-country comparisons reflect actual differences rather than scale artifacts.

SIS will not field research where it cannot guarantee respondent safety or data integrity. Active conflict zones, markets under comprehensive sanctions that prohibit commercial research, and economies with no operational field infrastructure are out of scope. For everything else — including post-conflict reconstruction markets, sanctioned economies with carved-out commercial activity, and politically sensitive jurisdictions — we discuss feasibility on a case-by-case basis and only commit when we are confident the work can be done responsibly.