Comparison of Landline and Cell Phone Response Patterns from a Call-Back Telephone Survey: Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) and Asthma Call-Back Survey (ACBS)

• Activity Number: 34
• Type: Contributed
• Date/Time: Sunday, August 9, 2015 : 2:00 PM to 3:50 PM
• Sponsor: Survey Research Methods Section
• Author(s): Xiaoting Qin*
• Companies: CDC
• Keywords: Response Patterns ; Call-back Telephone Survey ; Cellphone ; Landline

Abstract

Finding response patterns is key to increase survey completion. The ACBS follows up on the BRFSS by calling BRFSS respondents identified with asthma. Using the 2012 and 2013 ACBS disposition files, we computed the rate of eligible BRFSS respondents who agreed to a call-back (AR) and the ACBS response rate (RR) based on the American Association of Public Opinion Research formula. We also examined the difference in RR between landline (LL) and cellphone (CP) samples and assessed the impact of lag days between interviews on ACBS completion. BRFSS CP samples agreed to a call-back more often than LL samples (AR: 75.5% vs. 70.9%). However, when contacted for ACBS, CP RR was lower than LL RR (43.4% vs. 47.0%), except for adults aged 25-44 years. Among them, CP RR was 1.6% higher than LL RR. The difference in RR (3.6%) between ACBS LL and CP responses was smaller than the difference in corresponding BRFSS RR (11.8%, 2013 data). The RRs for both ACBS LL and CP responses were highest if call-back was within 2 days of BRFSS interviews (92.3% and 88.8%). As lag days increased, the ACBS RR decreased. The CP RR showed a sharper drop; after 2 weeks, the RR gap between LL and CP reached 12.0%.