Collaborative Research: Responding to Surveys on Mobile Multimodal Devices

随着通信技术发生快速和彻底的变化，收集具有国家重要性的调查数据(例如，关于就业、健康和舆论趋势的调查数据)变得更加困难。关于是否以及如何调整数据收集方法的重要基本问题亟待解决。这个项目调查了当受访者通过具有多媒体功能的手机(例如iPhone和其他应用程序手机)回答调查问题时，调查参与度、完成率、数据质量和受访者满意度如何受到影响。多媒体手机允许替代回答模式(语音、文本)，并允许受访者以不同于邀请他们的模式回答问题。两个实验将比较参与、完成度、数据质量和满意度，当面试代理是真人或计算机时，以及当沟通媒介是语音或文本时，结果是四种模式：人-语音面试、人-文本面试、自动语音面试和自动文本面试。第一个实验随机将受访者分配到这些模式中的一个；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与基于人工和基于计算机的面试代理进行不同的参与和回答，以及对于更敏感和不那么敏感的问题是否有所不同。结果还将揭示与特定媒介互动所需的努力(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(嘈杂环境、非私人环境、明亮的眩光环境使阅读屏幕变得困难)是否会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回复模式对回复率和数据质量有何影响。这些研究旨在使研究人员、调查受访者和更广泛的社会受益。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转至关重要的数据，保持高水平的联系和参与，同时收集可靠和有用的数据。对于调查受访者来说，潜在的好处是系统的设计，使他们的回答更方便、更愉快，并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答方式。对于更广泛的社会而言，至关重要的是，调查企业能够继续收集可靠的关键信息，并且不会随着公民对通信技术的使用发生变化以及关于人们的数字数据的替代来源激增而给公民带来不必要的负担。更根本的是，随着人们扩大了随时随地以各种方式进行交流的能力，这一结果将增加人们对人类交流方式演变的基本理解。作为支持调查和统计方法研究的联合活动的一部分，该项目得到了方法学、测量和统计方案和一个联邦统计机构联盟的支持。

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.