I'm trying to figuriung out a way to manage quotas over a CATI system (written in PHP+SQL and XML)

let's say we have a population like this:

CITY | #MALE | #FEMALE | AGE CLUSTER (YOUNG) | AGE CLUSTER (OLD) 
NY      200      250         350                   100         
LA      300      350         250                   400

Then we have the db containing all the ppl to be interviewed:

(name, city, sex, age cluster, telphone)

this db will not be necessarely representative of the first table, we have to consider also wrong tel number and any other sort of situation that may force us to drop a record and pass forward.

So, how we can achieve a good quota management at the end of the campaign? What's the best approach? It would be great, also, to maintain quotas over the time: let's say my campign'll last 1 year, I would like to perform a checkpoint at the end of the first 2 month and discover that quotas are ok...

• php
• sql
• xml
• statistics

The queXS software (I am the author) implements quotas for telephone interviewing (it calls them row quotas). The code is available here.

Have a look at the admin/rowquota.php file and the functions/functions.operator.php file.

Basically what occurs is:

Setup:

• You have a list of people to be interviewed (sample) as you describe
• There should be 2 lists, split by area (LA, NY)
• Each sample would have a quota of Males, Females, and Age cluster Young/Old

Running:

• The system records the outcomes of contacts to each number
• Where the outcome is "completed" the system finds all quotas that are fulfilled by that record and adds to the quota
• Where the quota is reached - all records that match the query (e.g. Males in LA) will be excluded

Describing the code here would be a bit tedious as a lot of the code is specific to the database setup of the system, but if you require further explanation please let me know.