Collaborative Research: Responding to Surveys on Mobile Multimodal Devices

由于通信技术经历了迅速和彻底的变化，收集具有全国重要性的调查数据（例如，关于就业、健康和舆论趋势的调查数据）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。该项目调查了当受访者通过具有多媒体功能的移动电话（例如iphone和其他“应用电话”）回答调查问题时，调查的参与、完成、数据质量和受访者满意度是如何受到影响的，这些移动电话允许替代回答模式（语音、文本），并允许受访者以不同于被邀请时的模式回答问题。当访谈代理是真人或计算机，沟通媒介是语音或文本时，两个实验将比较参与性、完成性、数据质量和满意度，从而产生四种模式：人-语音访谈、人-文本访谈、自动语音访谈和自动文本访谈。第一个实验将受访者随机分配到其中一种模式中；第二个实验允许被调查者选择他们的回答方式。结果将揭示使用这些设备的受访者是否同意以不同的方式参与和回答基于人类和计算机的访谈代理，以及这是否在更多和不那么敏感的问题上有所不同。结果还将揭示与特定媒介交互所需的努力（例如，输入文本比说话更努力）如何影响受访者的行为和体验，以及受访者所处的物理环境（嘈杂的环境，非私密的环境，灯光明亮的环境，使阅读屏幕变得困难）是否影响他们的模式选择和数据质量。最后，结果将阐明允许受访者选择他们的响应模式如何影响响应率和数据质量。这些研究旨在使研究人员、调查对象和社会更广泛地受益。对于研究人员来说，好处是让他们能够适应移动革命，因为他们收集对现代社会运作至关重要的数据，在收集可靠和有用数据的同时保持高水平的联系和参与。对于调查应答者来说，潜在的好处是系统的设计使其更加方便和愉快，并使他们能够选择适合他们的交互风格、主题和物理环境的响应方式。对于更广泛的社会来说，随着人们对通信技术的使用方式的改变和关于人们的其他数字数据来源的激增，调查企业能够继续收集可靠的关键信息，并且不会给公民带来不必要的负担，这一点至关重要。更重要的是，随着人们随时随地以各种方式进行交流的能力不断扩大，研究结果将加深对人类交流是如何进化的基本理解。该项目由方法、测量和统计项目和联邦统计机构联盟支持，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.