Much of the analysis in this report is based on a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 10-July 12, 2015 among a national sample of 2,001 adults, ages 18 years and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (701 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,300 were interviewed on a cellphone, including 749 who had no landline telephone). Specifically, findings pertaining to non-adopters and their reasons for not having service, people’s views on the disadvantages of not having broadband, and cord cutters, are based on the July 2015 survey.
Analysis of change in broadband and “smartphone-only” adoption from 2013 to 2015 are based on a September 2013 survey of 6,010 adults, ages 18 years and older, and combined surveys from April 2015 (1,934 adults); July 2015 (2,001 adults); and November 2015 (2,752 adults), for a total of 6,687 adult respondents.
The survey was conducted by interviewers at Princeton Data Source under the direction of Princeton Survey Research Associates International. A combination of landline and cellphone random digit dial samples were used; both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish. Respondents in the landline sample were selected by randomly asking for the youngest adult male or female who is now at home. Interviews in the cell sample were conducted with the person who answered the phone, if that person was an adult (age 18 or older). For detailed information about our survey methodology, see https://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/ .
The combined landline and cellphone sample is weighted using an iterative technique that matches gender, age, education, race, Hispanic origin and nativity and region to parameters from the 2013 Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and population density to parameters from the Decennial Census. The sample also is weighted to match current patterns of telephone status (landline-only, cellphone-only or both landline and cellphone), based on extrapolations from the 2014 National Health Interview Survey. The weighting procedure also accounts for the fact that respondents with both landline and cellphones have a greater probability of being included in the combined sample, and adjusts for household size among respondents with a landline phone. The margins of error reported and statistical tests of significance are adjusted to account for the survey’s design effect, a measure of how much efficiency is lost from the weighting procedures.
The following table shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the July 2015 survey:
The table below shows the unweighted sample sizes and the error attributable to sampling that would be expected at the 95% level of confidence for different groups in the September 2013 survey and the combined April, July and November 2015 surveys:
Sample sizes and sampling errors for other subgroups are available upon request.
