Pollsters often exclude cell phones from their surveys due to federal laws prohibiting autodial systems and concerns about compensation for airtime. Cell phone-only households are often clustered within specific demographics, making exclusion problematic. Pollsters historically avoided cell phones to avoid duplicating data and face geographical challenges. Pollsters can exclude cell phone exchanges from their lists to avoid calling them.
Pollsters can actually call cell phones, but there are some restrictions that cause most pollsters to simply exclude cell phones from their polls. With cell phone usage on the rise, some organizations that track surveys and collected survey data have raised concerns about excluding only cell phone demographics. By routinely omitting cell phones from surveys, these organizations argue, polling organizations could miss out on crucial data, especially since cell phone-only households are often strongly clustered within specific population demographics.
One major obstacle to pollsters wanting to call cell phones is that in the United States, federal law specifically prohibits the use of autodial systems to make unwanted calls to cell phones under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA). This means that if pollsters want to call phones, they have to dial the numbers by hand. Since most pollsters rely heavily on automated systems to make their jobs easier, this obstacle is by no means insignificant.
Also, pollsters need to consider the fact that many cell phone users pay for airtime. For this reason, some cell phone owners may be reluctant to answer survey questions on their cell phones. As a result, pollsters may feel obligated to offer some form of compensation, and in some areas compensation is actually required by law. Because of these issues, some pollsters believe it is best to simply exclude cell phones from polls.
Historically, most people who had cell phones also had a land line. This trend is constantly shifting, but polling organizations have been slow to respond to it, in part because it’s hard to get hard data on households that only use cell phones. The US Census tends to provide the best data on this, but since a full census only occurs every 10 years, the reliability of current data can be questionable. Pollsters historically avoided cell phones so they wouldn’t hit the same household twice, thereby duplicating the data.
Cell phones also present a geographical challenge. For example, someone might move to Illinois from California but keep their cell phone number, for a variety of reasons. Pollsters taking a poll in California would call the cell phone number, only to find out that the owner of the number actually lives in Illinois. This could mean that the data was useless, if the pollster was polling based on geographic region.
Now that you know all the reasons pollsters tend to avoid cell phones, you might be interested in knowing how pollsters avoid calling cell phone numbers. Cell phone users tend to use dedicated exchanges; for example, in the telephone number 123-456-7890, the exchange is “456”. Since cell phone companies control specific exchanges, pollsters can simply exclude those exchanges from dedicated lists, instead focusing on exchanges owned by cable companies.
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