Phone Surveys Don't Fully Measure Media Consumption

By: Sonya Moore When it comes to phone surveys of consumers' media behavior, not everything you hear is true. A new study from Ball State University's Center for Media Design in Muncie, Ind., finds that that telephone surveys and personal diaries fail to completely measure how much media Americans consume on a daily basis.

Bob Papper, a telecommunications professor and study co-author, described phone surveys as being "largely useless" for determining media behavior, likening them to throwing darts, in a statement released this week. The Ball State study used a three-part combined method of phone surveys (conducted with 401 people), individual diaries (kept by 359 individuals), and observation (shadowing 101 people for a day from the time they woke up to the time they went to bed).

The Middletown Media Studies were conducted in July and August 2003 with people living in Muncie and Delaware County, Ind. -- an area called "Middletown" in famed sociological studies conducted by Robert and Helen Lynd in the 1920s and '30s.

"Phone surveys reflect a person's perception of their media use but not their actual behavior," Michael Holmes, professor of communications studies and a member of the research team, said in the same statement, explaining the pros and cons of each method. "Diaries give more detail than phone surveys, but we found observation provides much more detail than diaries."

The Ball State phone survey in Indiana asked questions from various national Pew Research Center surveys. The results were remarkably similar, the university said.

But diaries and observation produced starkly different results, showing more media exposure, especially when it came to television. On average, people reported through phone surveys that they watched only 121 minutes of television per day. At the same time, diarists logged 278 minutes, and researchers observed individuals actually watching 319 minutes.

Interestingly, the various survey methods had the least differentiation when it came to newspapers. Phone surveys found people saying that they spent 15 minutes a day with their paper, while diaries revealed people spent 26 minutes. Researchers observed people spending 17 minutes with newspapers, not much different than the phone survey rate.

Other results showed that phone survey responders said they spent only 29 minutes online per day, but diarists said they logged on for 57 minutes each day and observations recorded people going online for 78 minutes a day.

One factor the phone surveys have a hard time measuring is simultaneous media use, an aspect of behavior that Ball State professors tried to find in previous studies and are hoping to explore further. "We intend to develop a clear picture of simultaneous multiple media use and how Americans are responding to the convergence of media technology," Holmes said.

The researchers found in this study that people had a tendency not to make diary entries about short-term repeated media use, like making or receiving phone calls, listening to the radio, and e-mailing. "For example, the observation study results suggest that not only did people watch the television programs they logged in their diaries, but they probably also opened the mail, made a telephone call or checked e-mail during a commercial; these uses tend to be omitted from diaries," Papper said.

The results of the observation showed people spending almost a quarter of their media day using more than one medium at the same time.