Legal Research

Are You Polling Cell Phone Users?

In your user surveys, who did you poll. When you poll your community of neighbours, scholars, studnets, etc., is your sample representative?

It is unlawful in the U.S. to poll people's cel phones without expliicit permission. The peril of this was learned in the early days of the current U.S. primaries and straw polls where years of amazingly accurate polls flew out the window when Millennials, hispanics and blacks started to vote in historically larger numbers in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Our friends at Pew have studied this issue and give us some data to think about.

Polling in the Age of Cell Phones

"Pollsters are wrestling with the issue of how to do telephone surveys in an age where more and more people cannot be reached on traditional landlines. The National Center for Health Statistics has just released new data showing that 14.5% of all American adults live in households with only wireless phones. They have no landlines.

Furthermore, certain segments of the population are even more likely to be "cell only." Some 30.6% of those ages 18-24 and 19.3% of Hispanics are cell only.

The Pew Internet Project has included cell-phone samples in several recent surveys and found notable variance in technology use by those we reach in our surveys who use cell phones and those we reach on landlines. Our colleagues at our polling firm, Princeton Survey Research Associates International, reported on the results of the comparison of different types of sample at the recent conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research."

The paper they presented can be accessed Does Cell Phone Interviewing make a difference?href="http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/Cell_Sampling_AAPOR_May08.pdf"> below.

View PDF (12 pages) of Report here

I suspect that if we're not being careful about our sampling techniques we'll be as surprised as John's, Hillary's, and Barack's advisors.

Stephen

Full post as published by Stephen's Lighthouse on June 05, 2008 (boomark / email).