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."

Comments

For Those...

[PakProtector]

...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

Poster gets it semi-right, Film @ 11

[Fortunato_NC]

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.