Cell Phone Only Households by State

[dtotire]

Cell Phone Only Households by State
By Brian Schaffner

There has been a lot of discussion of the Pew Report released earlier this week that shows that including cell-phone only respondents does appear to make a 2-3% difference in the presidential preference polling (see Mark's post). What's most intriguing to me is how this would play out at the state level. Indeed, it seems very unlikely that every state has the same percentage of cell phone only households. Thus, in states with fewer cell-phone only users, the effect of excluding such respondents may have less of an effect on the poll results. On the other hand, states where there are more cell-phone only households may have polling that is further off the mark.

I was hoping to be able to easily find some survey data with enough respondents to get a sense of the prevalence of cell-phone only households in each state. Unfortunately, the 2007 CDC data that is often cited provides more than enough national interviews to accomplish this task, but the dataset hides the state of the respondent, only allowing users to place respondents in a particular Census Region.

Nevertheless, we can learn a little about geographical variance from this data. Specifically, families in the South and Midwest are more likely to have cell phones only compared to states in the West and Northeast. Based on this data, we should expect polling from southern and midwestern states to be more prone to error from the cell-phone only problem than polling in other regions.

By Brian Schaffner on September 26, 2008 1:11 PM |

view the maps here:

http://www.pollster.com/blogs/cell_phone_only_households_by.php

[beac]

1. Thanks for posting this. K&R! n/t