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

Caller ID and call screening already do that

[WuphonsReach]

I would have to say that there is already an effect from the number of people with Caller ID or who screen their calls with answering machines. I know I don't bother picking up if there's no caller info or it says "GALLUP POLL".

The question for the market research is:

Does the universe of people who have cell phones correlate to the universe of respondents that I'm trying to reach or does it introduce bias? (I know just enough to get myself in trouble here...)

e.g. if 55% of your population is A, and 45% is B, and the cellphone population is also 55% A / 45% B, then it will have no impact on the results. OTOH, if the cellphone population is 75% A / 25% B, then there is going to be bias that will have to be corrected for in order to extrapolate back to the main population. (Guaranteed there is some wrong terminology there...)

Does it matter ?

[Krapangor]

From a mathematical point of view most surveys are fucked anyway. Biased data collection, misunderstood mathematical rules and "correction formulas" if the results don't seem to fit.
The problem is that many of the people in this business aren't mathematician and if they are then they are at best only second rates ones.
This poblem doesn't appear only in public survey - in fact most "statistics" in natural and political sciences are usually fucked. Most mathematicians don't care - we know that significance tests don't really give any viable results etc. So if people aren't interested in maths or aren't willing to invest time to understand it, then let them believe their rubbish.

Nevertheless all this whining about "skewed" surveys is meaningless, it's like complaing that the moon is made from bad tasting cheese.