Tag: Telephone Surveys
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Accuracy of US election polls
Nate Silver does a nice job this morning of summarizing the accuracy of and bias in the 2012 results of the 23 most prolific polling firms. I’ve copied his table below. Before we look at it we need to remember that there is more involved in these numbers than different sampling methods. The target population…
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Ying versus yang
NCHS just released the latest data on US wireless only households. The relentless march continues and as of December, 2011, a whopping 34% of US households have only a wireless telephone. To put it another way, you can only hope to reach about two-thirds of the US population when only calling landline telephones. Clear evidence,…
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The (wireless substitution) beat goes on
To no one's surprise the gold standard on wireless substitution in the US, the NHIS, reports that the proportion of wireless only households keeps growing. As of July, 2011, it was 31.6%. That's a 1.9% increase since December of 2010 and translates into 30.2% of all US adults. Just eyeballing the graph below it does…
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Cell phone data quality
My first taste of a methodological imbroglio was 25 years ago and involved the introduction of CAPI (computer-assisted personal interviewing). There was widespread speculation that interviewers using laptops for in-person interviewing might lead to unforeseen impacts on data quality. Empirical research taught us that we needn't worry and so CAPI became the standard. More recently…
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Can we really do two things at once?
Like most research companies mine now routinely includes cell phones in our telephone samples. Best practice requires that before we interview someone on a cell phone we determine if it's safe to do the interview. If, for example, the respondent is driving a car we don't do the interview. Yesterday someone asked me if it…
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Those pesky robo-polls
A new issue of Survey Practice is out and among the short articles is one by Jan van Lohuizen and Robert Wayne Samohyl titled "Method Effects and Robo-calls." (Some colleagues and I also have a short piece on placement of navigation buttons in Web surveys.) Like most people I know I have little regard for…
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Let’s get on with it
I spent some time over the weekend putting the finishing touches on a presentation for later this week in Washington at a workshop being put on by the Committee on National Statistics of the National Research Council. The workshop is part of a larger effort to develop a new agenda for research into social science…
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The relentless march of cell-only households
NHIS has released the latest estimates of wireless-only households in the US and, to almost no one's surprise, the steady increase continues. As of June 30, 2010 26.6 percent of US homes had only a telephone, a sharp increase of 2.1 percentage points since December of 2009. Another 15.9 percent of homes report that they…
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So much for robopolls
For about the last week or so I have been getting regular calls on my home answering machine from Governor Mike Huckabee whom I gather is once again running for President. While it seems to be the Governor's voice it also is a recording inviting me to do a survey by IVR. Somewhere back in…
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Cell only households continue to rise
CDC has just updated its estimate of cell only households from the National Health Interview Survey. For those of you not paying attention, this is pretty much the gold standard for tracking the growth of cell only households. CDC now reports that as of June of 2009, 22.7 percent of US homes have at least…