Assessing the Cell Phone Challenge
With fully a quarter of the U.S. adult population now relying solely on cell phone service, pollsters and other survey researchers face a difficult decision as to whether to include cell phones in their samples. A joint study by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press and the Pew Internet & American Life Project takes an up-to-date look at the potential biases in findings based on landline-only surveys.
Teens, Cell Phones and Texting
Fully 72% of all teens — or 88% of teen cell phone users — send text messages, up from 51% of in 2006. Among all teens, text messaging has now overtaken every other common form of interaction with their friends.
Are adults with only a cell phone represented in your polls?
Senior research staff answer questions from readers relating to all the areas covered by our seven projects, ranging from polling techniques and findings, to media, technology, religious, demographic and global attitudes trends.
The New News Landscape: Rise of the Internet
The overwhelming majority of Americans use multiple platforms to get news, and the internet has surpassed newspapers and radio in popularity as a platform, ranking just behind TV. News is also becoming more of a shared experience. More than 8 in 10 online news consumers get or share links in emails.
Internet User Profiles Reloaded
A new look at internet users finds 74% of Americans online, 60% using broadband at home and 55% surfing the Web wirelessly.
Latinos Online: Narrowing the Gap
From 2006 to 2008, internet use among Latino adults rose by 10 percentage points, from 54% to 64%, compared with a 4-percentage-point rise among whites and a 2-percentage-point rise among blacks. The growth among Latinos was driven mainly by increased usage by the foreign born and those with lower incomes — groups that have low rates of online activity.
More and More Teens on Cell Phones
Significantly behind just a few years ago, teens are quickly catching up to adults in cell phone ownership. Few demographic differences exist among teens in use, with one exception: age. A sharp increase in ownership occurs at age 14, right at the transition from middle to high school.
America Unwired
Accessing the internet is now a multiplatform affair with 56% of all Americans having accessed the internet by wireless means.
Accurately Locating Where Wireless Respondents Live Requires More Than A Phone Number
The mobile nature of wireless phones creates a significant problem for geographic sampling.This problem is exacerbated by the fact that the wireless-only are more geographically mobile than those with landline phones.
New Tricks for Old — and New — Dogs
Pollsters and other communications researchers are finding their job ever more challenging but also more interesting, and, with the help of new techniques and data sources, even more amenable.
