It turns out that grumpy people who say cellphones are destroying life as we know it may be on to something. According to the Washington Post, “Cellular telephones are perhaps the biggest threat to survey data that epidemiologists have confronted in years.”

The problem is that it is much easier to do surveys with landlines than it is with cellphones (or mobile phones, as the British are wont to call them). Given 16% of adults in the US live in houses that only have cellphones that could be a problem.

According to the Post it takes nine calls to cellphones to get one completed entry in the Federal Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey, which tracks health and behavior. As it only takes five calls to landlines it costs a lot more if you want to include cellphones in your survey, which you have to if you want accurate data. An additional complication, says the newspaper, is that “people answer the same question differently depending on how you reach them”.

Read the full article here.

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