Survey Interviews and New Communication Technologies

How people communicate with each other today—at least those with access to new technologies—is enormously different from how they communicated with each other even ten years ago. Internet-based cell phones, desktop videoconferencing, mobile instant messaging, blogs, podcasts, and other current modes of communication would have been unimaginable, or the stuff of science fiction, for prior generations. And the pace of change only seems to be increasing, with new generations embracing and creating newer forms of communication. The pace of this change poses a substantial challenge to one of the institutions on which modern societies rest: the collection of data in survey interviews. It is through individual survey interviews that societies track their employment, health, crime, demographic shifts, and citizens’ opinions about controversies of the day, among many other social phenomena. The moment in which a survey respondent provides an answer to a survey question is thus far more consequential than it might at first seem, and what takes place at that moment is in a state of major transition. Changes in communication technology have already led to questions about the accuracy and generalizability of large-scale survey data. For example, as cell phone adoption increases,

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