In managing quotas, the following rules apply:
If quotas are active, a stratum's Open/Half-open/Closed switch is automatically set to Closed as soon as its quota is reached. The instant that the response is supplied to a question which establishes that the respondent belongs to a stratum whose active quota is already full, the system issues a message to the interviewer, and automatically branches to the interruption question. When an interviewer is calling-back a respondent (hard call-back) who is already known to belong to a stratum whose quota has been reached, the interviewer is warned before the call takes place, and the program returns to its main menu.
If quotas are active, and if it is already known from the imported sample, or from a previous call, that the respondent belongs to a filled stratum, the case (a soft call-back) will not be dispatched by Interviewer's New command.
If quotas are inactive, the Open/Closed switches are not automatically changed. However, closing a stratum manually will prevent dispatching calls to new respondents in the stratum.
The Open/Closed switches control the dispatch of records to the interviewers; they have no effect on interviews in progress. They can be changed at will. For instance, they enable you to call offices in the day-time and households in the evening. However, if quotas are active, and a quota has been reached, you must first increase the quota accordingly if you wish to reopen the concerned stratum.
When calling back a respondent (using the Call-back command) who belongs to a stratum that has been manually closed, the interviewer is warned of this fact, and asked to confirm before proceeding.
The New command will not dispatch a case in a Half-open stratum when the number of respondents currently being interviewed has reached the number of cases remaining to complete its quota.
You may enter a quota for the overall number of completed interviews, and one for each stratum as defined by the Definition command. When a quota has a value of 0, it is ignored.
Important:
In the case of active quotas, it is good practice to provide for a "quota reached" response choice (call result) in the INT question. It is recommended that an INTQT question be included to capture this call result.
Since a respondent cannot be added to the (completed) frequency counters until the interview is completed, a stratum frequency may exceed its quota by a few respondents. See Half/Open strata, to reduce the risk of exceeding quotas.