Big Data Meets Survey Science

22Combining Active and Passive Mobile Data Collection: A Survey of Concerns

Florian Keusch^1,2, Bella Struminskaya², Frauke Kreuter^1,2,4, and Martin Weichbold⁵

¹Department of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, University of Mannheim, Germany

²Joint Program in Survey Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

³Department of Methodology and Statistics, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

⁴Institute for Employment Research, Nuremberg, Germany

⁵University of Salzburg, Austria

22.1 Introduction

Smartphones have become deeply ingrained into people's daily lives: users take pictures and videos, communicate through text messaging and calls, and use their phones to navigate around cities. Although technology adoption varies by country, the growing importance of smartphones is indisputable when one examines the rates of smartphone ownership and mobile Internet use. For example, 77% of US adults report owning a smartphone (Pew Research Center 2017b), and 91% of adults in the Netherlands, 84% of adults in Germany, and 79% of adults in Austria use the Internet on a mobile device (Eurostat 2018). Similarly high rates of smartphone ownership are reported for some countries in the Asia‐Pacific area (eMarketer Report 2017). The levels of smartphone ownership in Africa are substantially lower, but they vary considerably among countries (Afrobarometer 2018). The popularity of smartphones creates new opportunities for researchers who can use them to collect data through self‐reports ...