Collaborative Research: Responding to Surveys on Mobile Multimodal Devices

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Collecting survey data of national importance (for example, on employment, health, and public opinion trends) is becoming more difficult as communication technologies undergo rapid and radical change. Important basic questions about whether and how to adapt data collection methods urgently need to be addressed. This project investigates how survey participation, completion, data quality, and respondent satisfaction are affected when respondents answer survey questions via mobile phones with multimedia capabilities (e.g., iPhones and other "app phones"), which allow alternative modes for answering (voice, text) and can allow respondents to answer questions in a different mode than the one in which they were invited. Two experiments will compare participation, completion, data quality, and satisfaction when the interviewing agent is a live human or a computer and when the medium of communication is voice or text, resulting in four modes: human-voice interviews, human-text interviews, automated-voice interviews, and automated-text interviews. The first experiment randomly assigns respondents to one of these modes; the second experiment allows respondents to choose the mode in which they answer. Results will shed light on whether respondents using these devices agree to participate and answer differently to human and computer-based interviewing agents, and whether this differs for more and less sensitive questions. Results also will shed light on how the effort required to interact with a particular medium (e.g., more effort to enter text than to speak) affects respondents' behavior and experience, and whether the physical environment that respondents are in (a noisy environment, a non-private environment, a brightly lit environment with glare that makes reading a screen difficult) affects their mode choice and the quality of their data. Finally, the results will clarify how allowing respondents to choose their mode of response affects response rates and data quality. These studies are designed to benefit researchers, survey respondents, and society more broadly. For researchers, the benefit is to allow them to adapt to the mobile revolution as they collect data that are essential for the functioning of modern societies, maintaining high levels of contact and participation while gathering reliable and useful data. For survey respondents, the potential benefit is the design of systems that make it more convenient and pleasant to respond and that enable them to choose ways of responding appropriate to their interactive style, the subject matter, and their physical environment. For society more broadly, it is essential that the survey enterprise is able to continue to gather crucial information that is reliable and does not place undue burden on citizens as their use of communication technology changes and as alternate sources of digital data about people proliferate. More fundamentally, the results will add to basic understanding of how human communication is evolving as people have expanded ability to communicate anytime, anywhere, and in a variety of ways. The project is supported by the Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and a consortium of federal statistical agencies as part of a joint activity to support research on survey and statistical methodology.