Profiling the ‘mobile phone only’ population
One of the emerging issues facing telephone survey researchers is the proportion of the population residing in ‘mobile phone only’ households. This population (currently estimated to be around 13% of adults) is not contactable via traditional telephone interviewing methods which only include households with landline telephone connections. This gap in the coverage of traditional telephone surveys is a problem because it introduces a potential bias for telephone survey results. To date, the impact of this coverage gap has not been fully explored in the Australian context.
Given the above, the Social Research Centre and the University of Queensland Institute for Social Science Research (ISSR) have conducted what the authors believe to be the first ever dual-frame telephone survey in Australia. Two sample frames were used for the survey, a randomly generated list of landline telephone numbers and a randomly generated list of mobile phone numbers.
The objectives of this study were to:
- pioneer the conduct of a dual-frame survey in Australia
- better understand the issues involved in conducting telephone surveys using a dual-frame sampling methodology
- profile the ‘mobile phone only’ population, and
- determine the impact that the systematic exclusion of ‘mobile phone only’ persons from traditional landline telephone surveys has on the representativeness of the resultant survey estimates.
The results of this survey were presented at the recent ACSPRI Social Science Methodology Conference in Sydney in December 2010. The paper presented at the conference is available via our website Click here |
