May 19, 2010

Kennedy Wins High AAPOR Award for Cell Phone Research

Abt SRBI's Courtney Kennedy won the highly-coveted Seymour Sudman Student Paper Award at the May 2010 conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) in Chicago. This award, one of the AAPOR's top honors, "recognizes excellence in the study of public opinion, broadly defined, or the theory and methods of survey research, including statistical techniques used in such research."

Kennedy's paper, "Use of Cognitive Shortcuts in Landline and Cell Phone Surveys," uses a randomized design to test whether respondents may respond less accurately on a cell phone than on a landline because of issues unique to cell phone interviewing. These issues include often poor sound quality, multitasking by cell phone users while being interviewed, the sometimes presence of distracting environmental stimuli such as store announcements, lack of privacy when out in public as opposed to being at home, and other factors.

With few exceptions, Kennedy finds that there is no strong or consistent evidence that the answers respondents give when interviewed on a cell phone are inferior to those given when interviewed on a landline. Of the seven cognitive shortcut indicators tested, there was no evidence of a device effect for four indicators, weak evidence for two, and strong evidence of a device effect for only one.

She concludes that, "This is good news for dual frame survey designers who combine data from landline and cell samples to produce estimates. Differences in response accuracy between such samples are likely to be small, especially for questions that are not cognitively demanding,"

Kennedy's randomized research design was described by the presenter as virtually "perfect" and "elegant." The paper was based on Kennedy's doctoral dissertation at the University of Michigan. She is a Senior Methodologist in Abt SRBI's Advanced Survey Methods Group. She joined Abt SRBI after completing her doctorate this year.

Mark Schulman, CEO of Abt SRBI, commented that, "Growing cell phone inclusion in our surveys has raised a variety of thorny methodological issues. Courtney's research provides valuable reassurance on a critical issue of whether we're gathering good quality data from cell phone users. Courtney has made a tremendous contribution to our field."

Here's an interview with her on Pollster.com.

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/aapor_2010_courtney_kennedy.php

Abt SRBI, a leading public policy and market research organization, is the survey research arm of Abt Associates, the international public policy and technical assistance firm. Abt SRBI is headquartered in New York City, with offices in the Washington, D.C. area, Chicago, IL, Cambridge, MA, Fort Myers, FL, Durham, NC and other cities.