Use of Markets Hints/Set up Markets
Markets are very useful in controlling your sample and quotas. They provide sample controls like weighting.
The use of the !PHONE,ASSIGN_MARKET_WEIGHT statement in your spec can set your market weight, most commonly set to zero when a market quota is full. Setting your weights properly will control which markets are released to fill quotas.
The default maximum number of markets you can change the weight of in a single interview is 5, and if you exceed that you can receive a blow error 925. If you really think you need to change more weights than that on a single interview you can put the following command in your header:
maximum_phone_m=<nnn>
NOTE:We strongly recommend against setting this too high as there is a potential to cause severe system performance issues.
Each PHONE,ASSIGN_MARKET_WEIGHT command sends a single message to the study server. If you have a lot of them on every interview you can cause a severe bottle neck on your system.
We recommend that you never do more than one phone,m command per interview since you really should only be changing the market weight for the market of the phone record you currently have so that logic should be included on any phone,m statement.
The use of the !PHONE,GET_FROM_MARKETcommand will call a number in the market specified. It works like a
!PHONE,GET_SPECIFIC_NUMBER, and you do not need a !PHONE,GET_NUMBER or !PHONE,GET_SPECIFIC_NUMBER if using !PHONE,GET_FROM_MARKET.
Using !PHONE,GET_FROM_MARKET and !GET_MARKET_ONLY forces an interviewer to only get records from the specified market. By default, if there are no numbers available in that market, the program can get numbers from other markets for the interviewer in they are specific timed numbers. You can turn this off with !-GET_MARKET_ONLY compiler directive prior to the !PHONE,GET_FROM_MARKET command. Timed numbers that come up from other markets will then be put directly into ‘holding bucket’ for their market so they can be released and called later. !PHONE,GET_FROM_MARKET functions very similarly to special interviewer types.
MARKET_ZERO_STATUS sets the status of timed numbers coming out of a zero-weighted market. When a timed number comes up in a CLOSED market, it depends upon the setting for the market weight zero status parameter. This is the status value that is assigned to such numbers. Typical values are 213 (put it in the hidden stack) or 214 (put it in the holding bucket in the closed time zone) or you can set it to a resolved status if you do not it ever to come up again. If the value is 0, then it will be available to be dialed and will go to an interviewer and/or the dialer. Attached is a file calledthat shows how to set up markets in your fone file.
MARK.QPX shows how to set up Market areas. Use the file MARK.FBLin FONEBULD to build the file with market areas. You should always use a spec file in FONEBULD when using market areas so you can easily rebuild the file without having to re-type all the market information. Use the file MARK.RAW as the raw phone file and MARK.FBL to build the phone file.
MARK.FBLis the FONEBULD spec file to build a phone file for the MARK.QPX example.
MARK.RAWis the raw ASCII phone file that MARK.FBL points to.
Attached is a file called PHONL.ZIP that shows how to use a !PHONE,L statement in your spec.
PHONL.QPX shows how to use the Phone,L sub-type question in conjuction with markets to cause an interviewer to only dial numbers in a particular market. This can be used to control studies that are being done in multiple languages or to reduce the number of interviewers getting numbers from an almost closed market to reduce the chance of going over quota. Use the file PHONL.FBL in FONEBULD to build the fone file.
PHONL.FBL spec file for FONEBULD to build the fone file for the PHONL example.
PHONL.RAWis the raw ASCII phone file for thePHONLexample.
From the Supervisor you can use the market command to see the current counts in any given market or you can also assign weights values from 0 to 9 to any given market.
Market <studyname>will prompt you for which market to show or hit <cr> to see the weights screen.To automate the changing of weights use the mpf command. This would look something like this:mpf <studyname> market <marketname>=<weightvalue>For example, to change the newyork market in the bank study to a weight value of 3 would look like this:mpf bank market newyork=3