Abstract
As people increasingly communicate via asynchronous non-spoken modes on mobile devices, particularly text messaging (e.g., SMS), longstanding assumptions and practices of social measurement via telephone survey interviewing are being challenged. In the study reported here, 634 people who had agreed to participate in an interview on their iPhone were randomly assigned to answer 32 questions from US social surveys via text messaging or speech, administered either by a human interviewer or by an automated interviewing system. 10 interviewers from the University of Michigan Survey Research Center administered voice and text interviews; automated systems launched parallel text and voice interviews at the same time as the human interviews were launched. The key question was how the interview mode affected the quality of the response data, in particular the precision of numerical answers (how many were not rounded), variation in answers to multiple questions with the same response scale (differentiation), and disclosure of socially undesirable information. Texting led to higher quality data—fewer rounded numerical answers, more differentiated answers to a battery of questions, and more disclosure of sensitive information—than voice interviews, both with human and automated interviewers. Text respondents also reported a strong preference for future interviews by text. The findings suggest that people interviewed on mobile devices at a time and place that is convenient for them, even when they are multitasking, can give more trustworthy and accurate answers than those in more traditional spoken interviews. The findings also suggest that answers from text interviews, when aggregated across a sample, can tell a different story about a population than answers from voice interviews, potentially altering the policy implications from a survey.
Highlights
The growing use of smartphones is transforming how people communicate
People can no longer be assumed to be at home or in a single place when they are talking on the phone, if they are willing to talk on the phone at all as opposed to texting or using another asynchronous mode of communication [1]
Policies on disease prevention, health insurance, and risk-related behaviors depend on surveys such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), in which a consortium of US states and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention interview more than 400,000 US households per year to track health and disease trends
Summary
The growing use of smartphones is transforming how people communicate. It is ordinary for people to interact while they are mobile and multitasking, using whatever mode—voice, text messaging, email, video calling, social media—best suits their current purposes. People can no longer be assumed to be at home or in a single place when they are talking on the phone, if they are willing to talk on the phone at all as opposed to texting or using another asynchronous mode of communication [1] They may well be doing other things while communicating more than they would have been even a few years ago. World economies and US electoral politics can be significantly affected by the US unemployment rate reported each month from the Current Population Survey, a government-sponsored survey with a sample of 60,000 households per month As another example, policies on disease prevention, health insurance, and risk-related behaviors depend on surveys such as the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS), in which a consortium of US states and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention interview more than 400,000 US households per year to track health and disease trends. Any challenges to the accuracy of such data threaten our ability to understand ourselves collectively and create effective policy
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