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

固定电话调查已经使用了几十年，以产生有关消费者信心，健康状况，政治态度和美国公众的其他特征的关键知识。 由于广泛采用，而且在许多情况下，移动的（蜂窝）电话取代了固定电话，这种方法提供的覆盖面正在迅速下降。为了解决这个问题，调查研究人员已经开始用移动的电话号码的样本来补充固定电话调查。移动的电话调查的错误属性，特别是关于无应答和测量，在很大程度上是未知的。 研究人员对为什么有些人用移动的手机回答调查而另一些人没有的原因知之甚少。 与固定电话相比，人们在移动的电话上的反应是否不那么准确，这也是一个悬而未决的问题。 接触家庭以外的人或从事分散响应任务的活动的可能性可能会导致受访者采取更多的认知捷径，并提供相对于固定电话采访的不太准确的数据。 这些动态还可能降低调查估计数的可靠性，在某些措施中，甚至改变答复分布的平均数。 该提案详细介绍了一项创新研究，将解决文献中的这些空白。 重复测量设计将被用来深入了解个人层面的机制无应答，以提醒研究统计无应答偏倚的最大风险。 将受试者随机分配至电话类型（移动的/固定电话）将有助于测试移动的电话与固定电话访谈中认知快捷方式的差异使用。 本实验中使用的随机化步骤克服了限制先前研究的关键混淆。 这项研究将产生急需的关于移动的电话调查数据质量的知识。 这些知识将为研究美国公众统计数据的研究人员做出数据收集决策提供信息。

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.