ISER research into the use of mobile phones in surveys features in Research Magazine’s coverage of the recent Mobile Research Conference.
Writing on the magazine’s website after the conference, columnist Tim Macer, asserts that mobile research as a method may still be in its infancy, but that researchers already need to be aware of the fallout from the growing phenomenon of mobile communications, both in telephony and in data communications and the mobile web.
He cites research by Peter Lynn and Olena Kaminska showing that the differences in responses to the same questions in telephone and mobile surveys were mostly benign, though there were differences and that in the team’s experiments mobile phone interviews tended to last slightly longer, for reasons not fully understood yet.
Tim’s article concludes that:
“It is no longer safe to assume survey participants are using a conventional browser as their preferred means of accessing the Internet, and that trend will accelerate as other portable devices, such as Apple’s iPad and the imitators it will spawn, start to emerge.”