I was recently visiting with Ken and Elaine Lyons, the founders of the Independent Data Collection Center about telephone surveys, particularly CATI (computer assisted telephone interviews). The IDCC specializes in providing rigorously dependable and statistically valid data from focus groups, phone surveys, and other data collection methods, allowing researchers to just focus on analyzing the data. They’ve conducted thousands of CATI surveys across the U.S. and abroad, in a dozen languages, so I value their expertise on the subject.

CATI remains a very important tool for quickly collecting representative public opinion data very quickly. I had suggested that responsiveness to CATI surveys must be significantly characterized by demographics - ethnicity, geography, income, and particularly age group. My arguments were:

• Retirees would be disproportionately more likely to participate, due to accessibility, time availability, probability of owning a land-line phone, and enculturated in its use.
• Cell/mobile phones are increasingly prevalant as the generation groups become younger.
• Cell phones tend to be unlisted numbers, and it will be increasingly hard to generate raw call lists that contain representative proportions of cell phones.
• Unsolicited survey (and other) calls to cell phones are more likely to be met with hostility or resistance; in the U.S. most tend to consider their mobile phone their “private personal line.”

Ken and Elaine admitted that it is becoming increasingly difficult to build a representative cross-generation response rate for CATI surveys. Gen-Y and Millennials are likely to utilize their mobile phone as their only phone. Consequently, it is becoming harder to obtain CATI responses that accurately include the voice of the younger generation. Given the prevalence of CATI for collecting public opinion and market research data on any number of topics from political issues to product launches, this has important implications.

I wonder if the only effective ways to quickly reach out and collect feedback from Gen-Y will be those that simply don’t have the full statistical controls that we are used to from statistical sampling, such as snowball sampling (e.g., referral networks) or through social media (facebook, social networking sites, etc.).

Ironically, we may find that Gen-Y is also less likely to see unsolicited (survey) calls to their mobile contact point as less invasive than prior generations, particularly if the calls are properly incentivized (through actual survey incentives or through personal interest in the subject issue/product).

There’s a great link at “the future place blog” that discusses these trends: “More signs of the decline of CATI“. It’s a year old and UK focused, but it cites an interesting article regarding the decline of CATI data collection trends in contrast to internet-based data collection. Following up that post’s discussion, I’ve created a graph showing results from the 2007 CASRO Trends Survey . It’s clear that we are just now seeing a very significant drop in phone surveys in favor of internet-based surveys (the CASRO Trends Survey seems to focus more on the internet as a data collection tool, in contrast to utilizing internet-based media as an analytical source).

Also prominent is the slow decline in mail surveys, and the still negligable utilization of mobile phones as a targeted data collection media. The first company that can show a successful way to systematically collect opinion data from mobile phones probably has a real opportunity on their hands!

Finally, I have watched with interest the slow innovation of products and services such as google’s grandcentral.com that centralize personal telephone communications through computer management services. Before long, we are going to see the propogation of cell phone viruses and SMS / mobile phone spam, and in parallel, smarter incoming call filtering that to some extent will imitate the email spam / spam filter war. If that happens, CATI research may find it impossible to reach its research subjects at all!

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