Total Survey Error in Practice

14Text Interviews on Mobile Devices

Frederick G. Conrad,^1,2 Michael F. Schober,³ Christopher Antoun,^*,4 Andrew L. Hupp,¹ and H. Yanna Yan¹

¹ Survey Research Center, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

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

³ Department of Psychology, New School for Social Research, New York, NY, USA

⁴ Center for Survey Measurement, U.S. Census Bureau, Suitland, MD, USA

People’s communicative habits are changing with the rise of mobile devices. Increasingly, people are communicating when, where and in ways that are convenient and practical for the task at hand: talking in real time (with or without video), exchanging recorded spoken messages, exchanging written messages (through email or text messaging, or on social media sites), and in more than one mode at a time (e.g., integrating still images, audio or video with textual messages, or textually annotating an image they are sending). Even the most basic mobile phones, which in some parts of the world account for the majority of use (Poushter et al., 2015), allow text messaging. For an increasing percentage of the world’s population, texting is a primary method of daily communication, whether it is on a multimodal mobile device (e.g., a smartphone or tablet) or a phone with fewer multimodal options, and whether the text message travels via internet or a cellular network.

The daily prevalence of text messaging (e.g., 156.7 billion text messages sent per month ...