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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Is It the Young and the Restless Who Only Use Cellular Phones?
Source The American Association for (AAPOR) 59th Annual Conference, 2004 & WAPOR 57th Annual Conference, 2004
Year 2004
Access date 11.05.2009
Abstract

From a national survey of cellular telephone users conducted in 2003, it is possible to learn something about the characteristics, attitudes, and behaviors of those people who live in ‘mobile only’ households, that is, in households without a fixed line telephone. Of the 821 respondents to this cellular telephone survey, eleven percent report that they live in a household without a conventional, wired telephone. Of these, twelve percent (one percent of the achieved sample) said that they had not lived in a household with a fixed line telephone since they were 18. The analyses presented in this paper will compare the respondents from mobile only households along a number of different dimensions with respondents from households that maintain a standard telephone. In addition, the open answers these respondents gave to explain why they do not have a conventional telephone provide qualitative information that enriches our knowledge of the people who have ‘cut the cord.’ One expectation is that the cellular telephone as a mode of administration would allow surveys to reach population groups that had been previously excluded from telephone surveys. Thus we hypothesized that mobile only respondents in the cell phone survey would have lower SES levels and be younger than other cell phone users. The evidence from this survey indicates that this is the case and thus corroborates findings from personal interview surveys. However, our analyses outline several important caveats to this generalization and demonstrate how complex telephone surveys of the future will become. The estimate of mobile only households derived from the cellular telephone survey is considerably larger than other estimates even after being adjusted to the full adult population — (7 percent vs. 3 percent). Possible explanations for these discrepancies will also be explored. For instance, mobile only individuals may have larger buckets of minutes in their cellular plan and were, therefore, more willing to respond positively to our request for an interview.

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Year of publication2004
Bibliographic typeConferences, workshops, tutorials, presentations
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