Details here:
"We Americans simply don't answer our phones like we used to. Entire industries are now devoted to helping us not answer the phone. Voicemail, Caller ID, caller-specific-rings, cell-phones, even email have fundamentally transformed the ways we (don't) answer the phone when it rings. These and other technological innovations have moved us from a late-20th Century near-pavlovian automatic response of answering the phone when it rang, to new levels of screening or ignoring calls without a sense that we might be missing something important. When pollsters call under these technological conditions they are now increasingly treated as any telemarketer or unknown caller would be, thus the people who pollsters actually get to talk to are becoming increasingly less representative of the general public. There now may be something unusual about people who are willing to answer the phone a talk with strangers, and we should be skeptical about generalizing from the results of these surveys. It is possible that the new habit of non-phone-answering is evenly distributed throughout the population (thus reducing this as a sampling confound), but this seems unlikely.
"Anthropologist Robert Lawless once speculated on the possibility that many 'native informants' were often marginal, or 'odd' members of their societies. They were at times so unusual that they were the only ones willing to deal with the oddest of outsiders: anthropologists. The implication of this finding of course is that if anthropologists' primary informants are often marginal people, then it can be questionable to generalize from the information collected from interviews with them....
"[S]tatisticians and pollsters know that new telephone technologies present serious problems for standard telephone surveys. A Pew Research Center study released last April...found that:
"'More African-Americans than Whites have caller-ID (73% vs 47%) and a higher percentage of Blacks use 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 or older.'
"Pew also found that more women than men were found to use features like call blocking (20% vs. 14%). If we can get over the paradoxical fact that this data was collected in phone interviews (and of course the point of this piece is that I'm not sure we can get over that) you can see that those profiled as being most prone to answering phone surveys tend to be: (more) White, (more) older, and (more) male. Or if you prefer to think this through in hall-of-mirrors-phone-paradoxical-mode: We simply don't know how many households with Caller-ID were called and didn't choose to answer. Out of those homes who did answer the phone it was reported that those who didn't use call screening were more white, male & older. But for all we know there is a whole universe of households with the opposite attributes who used Caller-ID to avoid this poll."
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