Collaborative Research: Responding to Surveys on Mobile, Multi-modal Devices (2010-2013)

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Funded by the National Science Foundation

Funding years: 2010-2013

Increasingly people are communicating with one another through new media such as text messages exchanged via mobile devices. At the same time, survey response rates continue to drop. These phenomena are related to the extent that respondents only use mobile devices (21% of US households no longer have a landline phone) and frequently rely on modes other than voice, most notably text (which is certainly the norm among some subgroups in the US and increasingly among entire populations in other countries). Yet we know little about the impact of multimodal mobile devices on survey participation, completion, data quality and respondent satisfaction.

The proposed research will explore these issues in two experiments that will collect survey data on iPhones in four modes defined by whether the interviewing agent is a live human or a computer, and whether the medium of communication is voice or text. The resulting modes are telephone interviews, instant message (IM) interviews, speech integrated voice response (IVR), and automated IM. This way of defining modes enables us to isolate the effects of the agent and medium. The first experiment explores the effect of the four modes on participation, completion, data quality and satisfaction; the second explores the impact on the same four measures of allowing participants to choose the response mode.

More information: http://www.psc.isr.umich.edu/research/project-detail/34963

PI: Kathryn Moseley

Co-I: Mick Couper