Doctoral Dissertation Research: Nonresponse and Measurement Error in Mobile Phone Surveys

几十年来，固定电话调查一直被用来产生有关消费者信心、健康状况、政治态度和美国公众其他特征的关键知识。由于广泛采用以及在许多情况下取代固定电话，这一方法提供的覆盖范围正在迅速下降。为了解决这个问题，调查研究人员已经开始用手机号码样本补充固定电话调查。移动电话调查的误差特性，特别是关于无应答和测量的误差特性，在很大程度上是未知的。对于为什么有些人用手机回答调查，而另一些人不这样做，研究人员知之甚少。人们在手机上的反应是否比固定电话更准确，这也是一个悬而未决的问题。与家庭以外的人接触的可能性，或者参与的活动分散了回答任务的注意力，可能会导致受访者采取更多认知捷径，提供比固定电话采访更不准确的数据。这些动态还可能降低调查估计的可靠性，对于某些衡量标准，甚至会改变响应分布的平均值。这项提案详细介绍了一项创新研究，该研究将解决文献中的这些空白。重复测量设计将被用来洞察个体水平的无反应机制，以提醒研究人员对无反应偏差风险最大的统计数据的警示。将受试者随机分成手机类型(手机/固定电话)将有助于测试手机与固定电话访谈中认知捷径的不同使用情况。这项实验中使用的随机化步骤克服了限制先前研究的一个关键混淆。这项研究将产生关于手机调查数据质量的迫切需要的知识。这些知识将为研究人员做出的数据收集决策提供依据，这些研究人员提供了关于美国公众的统计数据。

Landline telephone surveys have been used for several decades to generate critical knowledge about consumer confidence, health conditions, political attitudes, and other characteristics of the American public. The coverage provided by this methodology is rapidly declining due to widespread adoption and, in many cases, substitution of mobile (cell) phones over landlines. In order to address this problem, survey researchers have begun supplementing landline surveys with samples of mobile phone numbers. The error properties of mobile phone surveys, particularly with respect to nonresponse and measurement, are largely unknown. Researchers have limited knowledge as to why some people answer surveys on their mobile phone but others do not. It is also an open question as to whether people respond less accurately on a mobile phone as compared to a landline. The potential to reach people outside the home or engaged in an activity that distracts from the task of responding could result in respondents taking more cognitive shortcuts and providing less accurate data relative to a landline interview. These dynamics could also reduce the reliability of survey estimates and, for some measures, even change the mean of the response distribution. This proposal details an innovative study that will address these gaps in the literature. A repeated-measures design will be used to gain insights into individual-level mechanisms of nonresponse to alert researches to statistics at greatest risk of nonresponse bias. Randomization of subjects to phone type (mobile/landline) will facilitate testing for differential use of cognitive shortcuts in mobile phone versus landline interviews. The randomization step used in this experiment overcomes a critical confound that limits previous studies. This research will generate much-needed knowledge about the quality of data from mobile phone surveys. This knowledge will inform data collection decisions made by researchers who produce statistics about the American public.