Mobile Interviewing: The Next Frontier of Data Collection
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Oct 28, 2009
Steve Lavine of Toluna discussed mobile interviewing at the 2009 ESOMAR Online Research conference, beginning by acknowledging that growth has been slower than expected. While online surveys provide real-time data delivery, such surveys are completed at home or the office: mobile surveys, on the other hand, can now put the survey right at the point of sale.
Mobile interviewing works well when you need immediacy or have to reach younger generations or otherwise hard-to-reach audiences. Mobile interviewing works well for diary studies, where panelists can record impulse purchases as they are being made, eliminating reliance on memory and increasing reporting rates; SMS can be used to send reminders to complete the diary. Camera phones can be used in ethnographic research, as respondents submit audio clips, digital images and even short videos about, for instance, the use of a product. Mobile interviewing can also be used for pharmacological testing.
Handheld devices have long been used for intercept surveys. Mobile tools leverage affordable hardware and work well in developing countries and can provide access to real-time information such as current quota levels.
Good target demographics for mobile interviewing include teens and Generation Y, who are reluctant participants in most other modes of research, but love to text, chat and surf. They love the challenge of the camera phone and eagerly send in images, audio clips and videos; this is true of any income level of teenagers. Much telecommunications research obviously makes sense to do on the mobile phone.
The mobile web provides a rich, extended survey experience with digital images, but many cell phones do not support the web. SMS surveys are discontinuous exchanges of information and are used for simple, text-only polling (a few choose-one or fill-in-the-blank questions), but are accessible to far more people in the U.S. and worldwide than mobile-web surveys. An emerging trend is the downloadable application, which offers rich survey experiences but only to a small installed base; maintaining an access panel of any size or representation is difficult; this works better for a small, well-known group such as employees or partners. IVR surveys fielded to cell phones require the creation and maintenance of an opt-in list for permission contact panelists at the mobile number; invitations are often sent by SMS and the phone IVR survey can be longer, from 5 to 12 minutes in length.
Mobile interviewing provides more rapid response time (2.6 hours) than the response rate of any non-mobile method (5+ hours), often 50% faster. Mobile IVR response time is 3.2 hours vs. 5.1 hours for mobile web surveys. This is a significant benefit for entertainment research. For traditional online surveys, SMS invitations provide a 3.9 hour response time, compared to 6.4 hours for email invitations. Respondents invite by text more closely match the population's age distribution.
In the future, more short-code surveys will be advertised point of sale and upon exiting the store. Expect to see proximity-trigged surveys using GPS, RFID, cell-tower triangulation and other methods, often with panel registration.