Industry must make cellphone research ‘more acceptable'

US-- Research industry association Casro says the industry needs to make cellphone research “viable, productive and acceptable”, as new figures show 29% of US households now rarely or never use a landline.

The proportion of cell-only homes rose to 15.8% in the second half of last year, and a further 13.1% of homes received all or almost all calls on cellphones, despite having landlines available. The figures come from a survey conducted by the National Center for Health Statistics.

The rise in people relying solely on cellphones is troubling for telephone researchers, as surveys in the US are generally conducted using lists of landlines. Surveying by cellphone is problematic because it is illegal to autodial cellphone numbers, and users often have to pay to receive calls.

Casro president Diane Bowers told Research that the industry must find ways to include cellphone users in research, while respecting many people's feelings that their cellphones are for private use.

“We're trying to look at it beyond the regulatory arena and think about how research can be viable, productive and acceptable via cellphone,” said Bowers. “I have an optimism that we can change our philosophy and become more respondent-centric so people will participate more. It requires a change in mindset for us. We can't expect a change in mindset from respondents.”

People living in homes with no landline were more likely to live with unrelated roommates, to rent rather than own their homes, to be aged between 25 and 29, and to be black or Hispanic, the survey said.

However, John Horrigan of the Pew Research Center said studies continue to suggest that excluding cell-onlys has little effect on results. “We're still finding that when you analyse your cell-only sample and blend it in with your landline sample we don't find very big differences in the overall results,” he said. “We should periodically be including cellphone numbers in our samples – which is a more expensive proposition for conducting the research – but we're still finding that the difference is only two or three percentage points, which is typically within the margin of error for sampling.”

Author: Robert Bain

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