Landline telephone surveys have been used for several decades to generate critical knowledge about consumer confidence, health conditions, political attitudes, and other characteristics of the American public. The coverage provided by this methodology is rapidly declining due to widespread adoption and, in many cases, substitution of mobile (cell) phones over landlines. In order to address this problem, survey researchers have begun supplementing landline surveys with samples of mobile phone numbers. The error properties of mobile phone surveys, particularly with respect to nonresponse and measurement, are largely unknown. Researchers have limited knowledge as to why some people answer surveys on their mobile phone but others do not. It is also an open question as to whether people respond less accurately on a mobile phone as compared to a landline. The potential to reach people outside the home or engaged in an activity that distracts from the task of responding could result in respondents taking more cognitive shortcuts and providing less accurate data relative to a landline interview. These dynamics could also reduce the reliability of survey estimates and, for some measures, even change the mean of the response distribution. This proposal details an innovative study that will address these gaps in the literature. A repeated-measures design will be used to gain insights into individual-level mechanisms of nonresponse to alert researches to statistics at greatest risk of nonresponse bias. Randomization of subjects to phone type (mobile/landline) will facilitate testing for differential use of cognitive shortcuts in mobile phone versus landline interviews. The randomization step used in this experiment overcomes a critical confound that limits previous studies. This research will generate much-needed knowledge about the quality of data from mobile phone surveys. This knowledge will inform data collection decisions made by researchers who produce statistics about the American public.
