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

几十年来，固定电话调查一直用于获取有关消费者信心、健康状况、政治态度和美国公众其他特征的重要知识。由于广泛采用，而且在许多情况下，移动（蜂窝）电话取代了固定电话，这种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的样本来补充固定电话调查。移动电话调查的误差特性，特别是在无反应和测量方面，在很大程度上是未知的。为什么有些人用手机回答调查，而另一些人不用，研究人员所知有限。与固定电话相比，人们对移动电话的反应是否更不准确，这也是一个悬而未决的问题。与固定电话采访相比，接触到家庭以外的人或从事分散回答任务的活动的可能性可能导致受访者采取更多的认知捷径，提供更不准确的数据。这些动态还可能降低调查估计的可靠性，对于某些措施，甚至会改变响应分布的平均值。本提案详细介绍了一项创新研究，将解决这些文献中的空白。重复测量设计将用于深入了解对无反应偏差风险最大的统计数据进行警报研究的无反应的个人层面机制。将受试者按电话类型（移动/固定电话）随机化，将有助于测试移动电话与固定电话访谈中认知捷径使用的差异。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。这项研究将产生关于移动电话调查数据质量的急需知识。这些知识将为统计美国公众数据的研究人员所做的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.