Cellular Telephone Use Among Households with No or with Substantial Interruptions in Land-line Service

• Activity Number: 433
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Thursday, August 12, 2004 : 10:30 AM to 12:20 PM
• Sponsor: Section on Survey Research Methods
• Author(s): John W. Hall*+ and Mourad Touzani and Yuhong Zheng
• Companies: Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. and Mathematica Policy Research, Inc.
• Keywords: cellular telphones ; nontelephone housholds ; in-person interviewing

Abstract

This paper examines the prevalence and use of cell phones among households who lack or have reported substantial interruptions in traditional land-line service and compares cell phone use in those households to that of other households with uninterrupted (or minimally interrupted) land-line telephone service. Data for this paper were collected as part an in person screening of 4,000 households for the Community Tracking Survey (CTS) to identify those with recent significant interruptions in telephone service. These households were sampled using area probability methods from a random subset of 12 (urban) sites of the 60 sites (PSUs) in the CTS sample. Due to the sampling strategy used, households screened have lower incomes than the general population. As part of screening, questions were added that asked about household ownership and use of cell phones. From these questions and others we can classify households as having no telephone service, having only cellular service, having only land-line service and having both land-line and cell service. The latter two groups can be further characterized by the length of any interruption in their land-line service.