Collaborative Research: Responding to Surveys on Mobile Multimodal Devices

随着通信技术的迅速和根本变化，收集具有全国重要性的调查数据（例如，关于就业、健康和舆论趋势的数据）变得越来越困难。 关于是否以及如何调整数据收集方法的重要基本问题迫切需要解决。 本项目调查了当受访者通过具有多媒体功能的移动的电话（例如，iPhone和其他“应用程序手机”），这允许替代模式的回答（语音，文本），并可以允许受访者回答问题，在一个不同的模式，而不是他们被邀请。 两个实验将比较参与，完成，数据质量和满意度时，采访代理人是一个活生生的人或一台计算机，当通信媒介是语音或文本，导致四种模式：人类语音采访，人类文本采访，自动语音采访，和自动文本采访。 第一个实验随机将受访者分配到这些模式之一;第二个实验允许受访者选择他们回答的模式。 结果将揭示使用这些设备的受访者是否同意参与和回答不同的人类和计算机为基础的采访代理，以及是否这不同的敏感性问题。 结果还将揭示如何与特定媒介（例如，输入文本比说话更费力）影响受访者的行为和体验，以及受访者所处的物理环境（嘈杂环境、非私密环境、具有眩光的明亮照明环境使得阅读屏幕变得困难）是否影响他们的模式选择和他们的数据质量。 最后，调查结果将澄清允许答卷人选择其答卷方式如何影响答卷率和数据质量。这些研究旨在使研究人员，调查受访者和社会更广泛地受益。 对于研究人员来说，这样做的好处是使他们能够适应移动的革命，因为他们收集的数据对现代社会的运作至关重要，在收集可靠和有用的数据的同时保持高水平的接触和参与。 对调查对象来说，潜在的好处是设计的系统使其更方便和愉快的回应，使他们能够选择适合他们的互动风格，主题和物理环境的回应方式。 对更广泛的社会而言，至关重要的是，调查企业必须能够继续收集可靠的关键信息，而且随着公民对通信技术的使用发生变化，以及随着关于人们的数字数据的替代来源激增，这些信息不会给公民带来不必要的负担。 更重要的是，随着人们随时随地以各种方式进行沟通的能力不断增强，这些结果将有助于人们对人类沟通方式的基本理解。 该项目得到了方法、测量和统计方案以及联邦统计机构联合会的支持，作为支持调查和统计方法研究的联合活动的一部分。

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.