GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November 2008 Broken Voices on Broken Phones – What to do about cell phone only households Nick Moon Managing Director, GfK NOP Social Research

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November The One-Minute (UK-specific) Summary  You can do election polls using RDD samples of cell-phone numbers BUT  You can’t get a nationally representative sample  You can’t get the right result by standard weighting  It costs twice as much

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November The UK Situation

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Mobiles By Age

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Mobiles By Social Class

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November 2008 Anti-Obama bias of landline only polls 6 Can you hear me now? Obama's missing 2 percent By failing to survey cellphone-only voters, pollsters could be undercounting Barack Obama's support by millions of voters. Pew: Cellular Polling Bias Hurts Obama Why lack of cellphone polling is creating bias in US Presidential polls Pollsters Not Capturing Key Obama Demo: Cell Phone Only Voters

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November 2008 Anti-Obama bias of landline only polls? 7 Source: fivethirtyeight.com, Sunday before polling day

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November 2008 Final election polls 8

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November The 2005 Experiment  General Election offered an opportunity  Our polling was all being done by RDD  Mobiles only experiment run at same time  RDD sample with same quotas as main survey  Impossible to keep to quotas  as we expected

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November The NOP Prediction Poll NOPActual result

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Unweighted By Gender TargetTraditionalMobile Male Female

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Unweighted By Age TargetTraditionalMobile

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November With standard political poll weighting TraditionalMobile Conservative3324 Labour3537 Liberal Democrat2328 Other911

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Traditional and Mobile by Age Average difference between traditional and mobile

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Likelihood of Voting TraditionalMobile 0 or to to or Mean score8.48.0

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Costs and Outcomes  Is it more expensive?  Is it harder to get cooperation?  Do you get different dispositions?  Debrief of team leaders revealed no particular problems  Other than filling quotas  Did not get more refusals on the mobile sample

GfK NOPSocial ResearchEurobarometer Conference Paris 21 November Interviewing Hours Total Traditional242 Mobiles420