Will going all-wireless skew survey data?
In a post I wrote a couple of weeks ago, I talked about how people are giving up their landlines and going all-cellular in increasing numbers. In fact, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued a study not too long ago that addresses this issue, but in the context of their conducting of their annual National Health Interview Survey.
According to this story, it seems that the CDC is now making it a point to ask people in their survey what kind of phones they have–landline, cellular, or both–and asks how best to call them back in order to make sure the data they collect is accurate. If the CDC is unable to call back survey respondents to either clarify information or seek more data, it can likely skew the results and this could eventually lead to patient/disease information that may be inaccurate or incomplete.
Plus, the demographics of who is going all-wireless is interesting to note–more than half of all adults living by themselves are going all-wireless, while the overwhelming majority of adults 45-to-64 (and older) still rely on their landline phones as their primary telephone with a cellular phone acting as a secondary source.
What this means is that the CDC or other groups who conduct surveys will have to work that much harder to be able to reach enough of a survey sample to reflect accurate results, which is why there remains a strong call for a wireless phone number directory despite the concerns about privacy, especially when it comes to telemarketers.
It really is interesting to think about. If you take it to the nth degree, would a cellular phone directory be necessary in the future when it comes to surveying the population, whether for patient information, political polls, or consumer data? As this story suggests, there isn’t a large enough segment of the population yet that has gone all-wireless to really see a definitive trend, but in 10 years, or even 5, that could very well change.
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