For fiscal year: _____/____/____ to _____/____/____
Month Date Year Month Date Year
NOTE: Project summary and introduction. To be provided by individual grantees.
A. General
Questions
We’d like to start by asking you
some general questions about the management information system (MIS) at [organization name].
A1._ Does your MIS consist of a single data
system, or multiple data systems? Are
all of the systems comprising your MIS linked to each other? Are you familiar with all data systems
comprising your MIS? _______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A2._ What software do you use to maintain
your MIS (e.g., MS Access, DBase, SAS, MS Excel, or custom software)? _____________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A3._ Do employees enter the data directly
into a computerized database, or do data entry personnel enter data from hard
copy forms? _______________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A4._ Are most data updated on a regular
basis? Are there any data that do not
get updated for some reason? _______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A5._ Do you have experience creating data
files or data extracts from your MIS?
By a data extract, we mean writing all records for a given individual to
an electronic file, not creating a report summarizing activity for a group of
employees. ____________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A6._ If you were to provide us with a data
file, what type of file could you provide us (e.g., block ASCII, MS Excel,
DBase)? _________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
A7._ Is your MIS year 2000 compliant? If not, what problems or changes to do you
anticipate occurring between now and the year 2000?____________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
B.
Confidentiality—Employee Identifying Information
Because of the sensitive nature of
our data request, we want to be sure that we protect the confidentiality of the
involved employees. So now we’d like to
ask you some questions about patient identifying information and
confidentiality issues.
B1._ Part of our research requires that we
receive employee-level data from you and merge that with employee-level data
from other sources. In order to do
this, we need to use a patient identifier that uniquely distinguishes one
employee from another. The employee’s
Social Security number might be an example of such an identifier. Can you provide us with such an
identifier? What do you call that
identifier? ______________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
B2._ What assurances of confidentiality do
you require to release this identifier to us?
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
C. Data
Availability
Next, we’d like to ask you some
questions about the availability of certain broad types of data. By availability, we mean that you would be
able to provide us with the data in an electronic file.
C1. An important part of understanding your
MIS is understanding how often data enter your MIS. For those data that get updated, how often are they entered into
your MIS? Are some data updated at
different intervals than others (e.g., annual versus monthly updates)? ______________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
C2. Another important aspect of understanding
your MIS is understanding how the data are maintained. When data are updated, are the old values stored
in an historical database, or are they overwritten by the new data? ___________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
Many data items, such as total gross pay, are often maintained only as
cumulative year-to-date values. For any
data that you maintain as year-to-date values, is the previous year-to-date
value overwritten each time the field is updated?______________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
C3. Finally, we’d like to find out how often
you could transfer data to us. We’d
like to get data often enough to capture important changes in an employee’s job
performance, but not so often as to be an undue burden on you. Can you provide us with data on specific employees on a monthly,
quarterly, or annual basis?
a) Monthly ______________________________________________________
b) Quarterly ____________________________________________________
c) Annually _____________________________________________________
If
not, what level of data can you provide us?
________________________
____________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________
D.
Historical Records
An important part of understanding
employees’ current job performance is understanding their past job
performance. Thus, we’d like to collect
historical data going back at least 5 years.
D1. Does your current data system include
historical information for the last 5 years?
a) Yes.
Does your data go back even farther?
How far back? ____________
b) No. How far back does your data go? _____________________________
D2. Are there any reasons why some historical
data may be lost between now and the start of any data collection, because of
routine or periodic data purges, for example?
_______
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
D3. Are cumulative data (e.g., year to date
data) maintained historically, or are they reset at the beginning of each
period? ___________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
E.
Available Data Fields
Now we’d like to ask you about the availability
of specific data fields. Which of the
following data elements do you have?
Employee Demographic Data
Data Variables
|
Available Electronically?
|
Notes
|
|
Date of
birth
|
|
|
|
Sex
|
|
|
|
Race/ethnicity
|
|
|
|
Education
|
|
|
|
Marital
status
|
|
|
|
Division
or department
|
|
|
|
Job title
or occupation
|
|
|
|
Years
with company
|
|
|
|
Wage or
salary
|
|
|
|
Employee’s
worksite for multi-site firms
|
|
|
|
Employee’s
health insurance plan
|
|
|
Employee Performance Data
Data Variables
|
Available Electronically?
|
Notes
|
|
Days or
hours absent due to illness
|
|
|
|
Days on
leave without pay
|
|
|
|
Days or
hours of unexcused absences
|
|
|
|
Days or
hours late for work
|
|
|
|
Formal
warnings for poor performance
|
|
|
|
Probationary
periods
|
|
|
|
Promotions
or demotions
|
|
|
|
Number
of grievances
|
|
|
|
Termination
date
|
|
|
|
Termination
reason
|
|
|
Employee Performance Data (continued)
Data Variables
|
Available Electronically?
|
Notes
|
|
Number of
on-the-job accidents or injuries
|
|
|
|
Number of
vehicular accidents
|
|
|
|
Dollar
value of damage to vehicle or other equipment
|
|
|
|
Hours or
days away from work as a result of accidents or injuries
|
|
|
|
Restricted
duty days as a result of accidents or injuries
|
|
|
|
Dollar
value of worker's compensation claims
|
|
|
To better understand the data we’ve
just discussed, we’d like to examine a test file containing the data items
listed above. Please send us a test
file with these data items for approximately 100 cases. This test file is the best way for us to
verify our understanding of your data system.
Could you please send this test file to us at the following address?
Grantee contact
address line 1
address line 2
address line 3
Do you have any questions regarding
this test file?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
F.
Transferring Data
Finally, we’d like to ask some
questions about transferring the data from [organization
name] to us. Because the data files
we are requesting may be large, we would prefer to receive compressed data
files on a single electronic medium such as tape or CD-ROM.
F1._ Could you write the data files to tape
or diskette? If so, please list all
formats for both tape and diskette (e.g., 8-mm tape or 3.5” diskette). Please include CD-ROM if you can write data
to that medium.
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
F2._ Could you send us a compressed data
file? If so, what is the file
compression utility you would use (e.g., PKZip, Microsoft Backup, etc.)? _______________________________
_______________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________
To facilitate our understanding of
your data system, we’d like to see a printed list of all data fields available
on your MIS (including definitions of those fields and definitions of any codes
used). Could you please include this
list with the test file we discussed above?
Do you have any questions concerning this interview, the test file, or
the list of available data fields that we’ve requested?
Thank you for your time. This interview has been very helpful.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Notes
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________
