The Most Dangerous Research Practice in Radio Today

Recently, the Pew Research Center published an update on the state of telephone research and noted that they continue to move more and more of their polling to online panels. We, too, have moved to incorporate more and more online sample into our survey efforts. In some cases, we continue to do telephone surveys (with mobile phone sample); in others, we pursue a hybrid approach combining telephone and online sources.

A point that I have seen glossed over from the Pew article is this: phone surveys haven’t stopped working, and they haven’t gotten “worse.” In fact, the article makes the opposite point — to date, there is no evidence that a decline in response rate has led to a decline in the quality of phone research — it’s just getting more expensive to conduct. Today, despite the challenges with telephone research, it remains the most accurate form of sampling. And don’t take my word for it, or an uninformed word to the contrary — it continues to be settled law as far as professional survey researchers are concerned.

Proper telephone sampling incorporating mobile phone users remains the best methodology to produce representative, projectable research. The issue isn’t efficacy — the issue is cost, and that issue is certainly relevant to the vast majority of radio stations in America. Pew concludes that telephone research is largely…