Exploring Mode Effects Between Smartphone and Personal Computer Mode of Administration of a National Household Study
Kristine Wiant
RTI International
Ashley Richards
RTI International, Research Triangle Park, NC
Stephanie Zimmer
RTI International
Danielle Mayclin
U.S. Energy Information Administration
Sixty-eight percent of U.S. adults now own smartphones (Pew Research Center, 2015), and smartphones are increasingly being used by respondents to respond to web surveys (Dillman, 2015). Mobile respondents may be completing the survey while experiencing greater distractions than personal computer (PC) respondents as they attempt to complete the survey "on the go," leading to more skipped items or less thorough responses than PC respondents. Likewise, even with surveys that have been optimized for smartphone use, visual presentation of some types of survey items on smartphones may differ from the presentation of the same items on a PC, which has the potential to lead to mode effects. In this analysis, we draw on two successive web implementations of the Residential Energy Consumption Survey (RECS) to investigate potential mode effects between PC and mobile modes of administration, focusing on item nonresponse and survey response distributions. We investigate the impact of strategies to reduce nonresponse and differences in response distribution between PC and mobile respondents.