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Will Cellular Phones Skew Survey Results?
FriedEgg writes "Recently, many people have started to forgo traditional landline telephones in favor of cellular phones only. This presents a problem for telephone pollsters who are prohibited by the FCC from calling cell phones with automated equipment, and from calling people for whom receiving the call costs money. While they recognize the exclusion of cellular only users can skew their results, they're not yet sure how much... because they're unable to survey cellular only users to find out their demographic information. Some evidence does indicate the frequency of cellular-only is highest among 18-24 year olds, traditionally the hardest to survey anyway. If the problem grows worse, it's possible we could end up with a "Dewey Defeats Truman"-like situation where the telephone poll results were skewed because Truman supporters were less likely to own a telephone."
...Of you who slept through History class, 'Dewey Defeats Truman' refers to the 1948 presidential election in which it was projected a man named Dewey would defeat encumbant president Truman, due to skewed mail-in poll results.
Link is to Historybuff for more info. Dewey Defeats Truman
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
Perhaps you are referring to instant runoff voting?
"Instant runoff voting (IRV) is a voting reform that asks the voter to rank the candidates in order of preference."
"In an unscientific poll last month by CNN and Money magazine, 41 percent of more than 11,000 voluntary participants said they would be inclined to pull the plug on their land lines and go entirely wireless."
Unfortunately no reason is stated, but I have a feeling that "so these stupid pollsters don't call and pester me" is one of the leading reasons.
That particular poll used voluntary participants (i.e. people who weren't called on the phone to take the poll). Read all of what you paste.
In Europe the caller pays. It's a Good Thing(tm).
The only trick in America would be that there would ahve to be some way to alert the caller to the type of charges they are about to incur.
The actual Dewey Defeats Truman headline was based more on early election returns than skewed polling. The famous error made concerning polling in the 1948 election was that Gallup simply stopped doing polls two weeks before the election and proclaimed that Dewey would win, not taking into account the massive sea change in public opinion that can occur over a two week span.
The famous example of a poll gone bad because of telephone ownership statistics was the poll used by the magazine The Literary Digest to predict the 1936 presidential election between FDR and Al Landon. The magazine mailed ballots to 10 million individuals with listed phone numbers and/or car registrations, and tallied up roughly 2 million returned ballots. Based on the results, the magazine predicted a Landon victory, while in fact the result was a 46-state landslide for FDR (and remember, there were only 48 states in 1936)!
The sample error in this survey was that telephone ownership and car ownership did not correlate to likeliness to vote in 1936. In 1936, at the height of the Great Depression, telephones and cars were luxury items that few people besides the wealthiest Americans could afford. The poor and lower class who were more likely to vote for FDR were not even sent ballots, so there was no way for their voices to be heard in this survey.
The impact of this flawed survey was such that within a short time after the publication of the survey, The Literary Digest would go out of business.
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The article doesn't provide many numbers, so I better provide some. In Denmark, there are more cellular subscribers now than fixed line subscribers. Of the 11 houses on our street, 2 only use cellular phones, and one of these has ADSL but no fixed line subscription.
In my nephiew's class, 2 families out of 24 don't have a phone number that belongs to a fixed line.
Currently, a fixed line costs 255 euros to create in Denmark, and 16 euros a month. It's cheaper per minute than a mobile phone, unless you call a mobile phone - in which case the mobile phone is cheaper per minute. Add to that the costs of buying a phone.
A mobile phone can be bought very cheap - used phones are normally 15-30 euros, there is no subscriptions fees and it's now down to 9 cents a minute outside workhours and down to 11 cents a minute in workhours. All prices include the Danish 25% Value Added Tax.
So in general, mobile phones are cheaper for most people, and more and more people are abandoning their fixed lines. The skew is already here and it's growing.
The do not call registry doesn't apply to pollsters. So they can still call. You are right though, what kind of freak actually takes phone polls (unless they directly apply to something important to you)? I don't even hang up on them anymore. I take the time out of my day to give them fake information. "As a Florida resident, what theme park do you most frequent" "Gatorland!"
Unfortunately, (at least from my point of view), political pollsters are exempt from the "do not call" list, as are charity organizations.
And for those who made earlier comments about liberal vs. conservatives with cell only access, I know of several political conservatives (30s and 40s) with only cell phones, and numerous luddite liberals with only landlines. I really doubt that political affiliation or leaning has much to do with this, it is more of a comfort level with the technology. Yes, that seems to skew things toward the younger more often, but many of the younger generation are more conservative than their parents.