What is impact of Caller ID on polling data?

[Ugnmoose]

I suspect that a large number of households now have Caller ID and when they get a call from someone they don't know won't answer. Is it possible that this might affect the polling results? Any thoughts?

[Stew225]

1. I don't know how I ever lived without caller id.

If it's an unknown number or 800 number or, for that matter, anything that resembles the number of a telemarketer or surveyer we don't answer the phone. I have to wonder how many others do this.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

3. TONS of people do this! I know because as part of my work I have

to call a few people most nights. I generally block my number because I don't want them to have access to mine, but I frequently have to unblock to get a call through to many of them. So a LARGE PERCENTAGE of people are screening calls now in various ways including answering machines and caller ID.

Now whether this skews the polls one way or another is unclear, but I don't know if the pollsters are modelling for it. It is certainly a BIG change from even a few years ago.

[juslikagrzly]

2. I've thought about that too

We have however started answering it just so we can participate in these "polls". I've gotten about 4 such calls in the past few months.

It's tough though because they use those computer generated dialing programs and there's always a delay before they start talking. Often I just hang up, rather than stand around and wait.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

4. When it's a pollster, how does it show up on caller ID though?

[juslikagrzly]

6. Don't think it does

just shows up as unknown caller, or a weird area code, or whatever.

[snowbear]

5. Phone polling...

I'm not sure about caller ID.. but I do think the fact that so many people use cell phones; especially college kids, aren't being polled.

[LiberalFighter]

11. I saw an article that overall 5% have ONLY cell phones

About 5 percent of all households receive telephone service only by cellular phone, according to a face-to-face survey done earlier this year by the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
/snip/

That by itself is not enough I think to make a difference YET.

/snip/
Among young adults up to age 24, the number is close to three times as high.

"Many of these people are not voters," said Linda Piekarski, vice president of database and research at Survey Sampling International, which provides samples for the research industry.

"They've always been hard to get into our polls anyway. They tend to be non-responsive."

CNN Don't know how much weight to consider with CNN at this time.

The caller id and people being busy would probably have more of a factor since that reduces the universe that the pollsters can use.

[endnote]

7. That rules out SMART people then....

Or busy people. Don't believe any polls for the next 2 weeks. Tell everybody.

[popstalin]

8. From Alternet

Thanks to answering machines, caller ID and telemarketers, polling response rates have plunged to 30 percent—and lower. It's pretty hard getting a good read on the public's opinion when people keep hanging up on you.

Plus, pollsters never call cell phones—of which there are now close to 170 million. And even though most cell phone users also have a hard line, a growing number don't—especially young people, an underpolled and hard-to-gauge demographic that could easily turn out to be the margin of difference in this year's race.

http://www.alternet.org/election04/20105/

[3113]

9. 90% of those who do answer the phone refuse to talk to them.

In addition to the significant numbers who ignore calls via caller ID, one polster admitted that 90% of people they call refuse to talk to them. Add to that the ever increasing number of voters with only cell phones that cannot be polled (I'm one of them), and newly registered voters that are not part of these polls (as are many friends of mine).

[IIgnoreNobody]

10. The impact is,

anyone who thinks having a phone does not imply an obligation to talk to anyone who calls, does not get polled.

I pretty much never speak on the phone to someone I don't know.

[oscar111]

12. bill collector victims = democrats who not answer

i bet another segment is those harrasesd by dunning calls. If they have any sense at all, they will vote dem.

and surely most of them have gotten caller ID and shun unknown callers.

[naufragus]

13. If i dont know the number...

i do not answer the phone...EVER

if it is "unavaible" thats also a definate do not answer

thats what the machine is for.

if people have finacial problems they also probably will not answer the phone

[AirAmFan]

14. But are these sources of nonresponse and noncoverage highly correlated

correlated with intention to vote for Kerry? And which ways do the correlations go?

I don't think anybody really has the answers to either of these questions, and so the effect of Caller ID, wireless only, screening with answering machines, etc. is to increase the intrinsic uncertainty of polling more than to bias the results in any particular direction.

For instance, those screening calls to avoid bill collectors MIGHT tend to be poorer and more likely to vote Democratic (and less likely to actually turn out to vote).

BUT, call screeners who want to avoid real estate sales pitches, holiday pleas for donations, identity theft scams, etc. might tend to be wealthier and more likely to vote Republican.

People in their twenties are less likely to be covered by random-digit-dialing efforts that can't call wireless-only households. But are wireless-only young adults more likely to be Democrats or Republicans? Aren't young Republicans more likely to be able to afford unlimited cell phone plans than young Democrats?

[Ugnmoose]

15. kick

Good comments, but does anyone have any statistical data from pollsters as to how they factor this into their numbers.
Quite frankly, I think the poll numbers are highly skewed and not representative of mainstream opinion. But that's just my guess.

[AirAmFan]

16. Estimates of call screening effects are quite rare, but there are a few

In fact, few surveys even REPORT overall rates of nonresponse, let alone conduct side research projects to try to measure sources and effects of nonresponse. It seems that 30 PERCENT response (and 70 percent nonresponse) is considered quite respectable in election polling these days!

The Pew Research Center has conducted two sets of telephone surveys to try to measure the effect of call screening. They concluded that rising rates of outright refusal to cooperate with telephone interviewers, rather than any increase in failure to contact people, explains dramatically rising rates of nonresponse in telephone opinion polls.

A "standard" effort for them takes five days of trying to reach each of about 1000 households in a fixed representative sample. In 2003, such an effort got a response rate of 27 percent, compared to 36 percent in 1997.

For research purposes, Pew also has twice tried "rigorous" surveys that spend five MONTHS (not the usual five DAYS) trying to reach samples of the same size. These efforts each resulted in contacting 92 percent, both in 1997 and 2003, but because of rising noncooperation achieved a 2003 response rate of only 51 percent, compared to 61 percent in 1997.

The high-effort surveys asked detailed questions about use of call-screening and call-blocking technologies:

From http://www.pewtrusts.com/pdf/pew_research_polls_042004.pdf

"While answering machines and voice mail are more common than caller ID, the latter is employed more regularly to screen calls, with 27% of the public saying they always screen calls with caller ID (compared with only 17% who say they always use an answering machine to do this). More African-Americans than whites have caller ID (73% vs. 47%) and a higher percentage of blacks always uses it for call screening (34% vs. 24%). Young people ages 18-29 are the group most likely to say they always screen calls with caller ID (41% say this), compared with only 12% those aged 65 and older.

Privacy managers or call blocking, which electronically stop certain calls from reaching a household, are less common. More women (20%) than men (14%) report using this technology.

But the study finds no evidence that the widespread use of call screening devices is in itself undermining the reliability of survey research. The percentage of households in which a personal contact was made during the five-day standard survey period was higher in 2003 than it had been in 1997 (76% vs. 69%), though more calls per telephone number were needed to achieve the desired number of interviews in last year�s survey. The "contact rate" for the rigorous study in 2003 was identical to that obtained in 1997 -- nearly every residential household identified in the sample (92%) had been contacted verbally at least once by an interviewer.

It is possible that call screening is even more prevalent among households in the sample where an interview was never obtained. The evidence on this point is mixed."