Journal of Electoral Studies

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Allocation of Dual-Frame Telephone Survey for Given Cost

Hung-chia Chen
2019 / 05
Volume 26, No.1

pp.31-56
10.6612/tjes.201905_26(1).0002
Paper

Abstract

With the increase of cell phone usage in recent years, traditional landline surveys face a problem of incomplete coverage. It is now necessary to conduct dual-frame telephone surveys that includes cell phone samples and landline samples. Designing a dual-frame telephone survey requires a decision on the sample allocation. The allocation of the sample to the dual-frame associates with the unequal weighting effect and the survey cost. Therefore, this study aimed to illustrate an optimal allocation of respondents from landline and cellphone frames that result in the lowest unequal weight effect (i.e., the highest effective sample size) for a given cost by using the relative unit cost of obtaining a cell respondent compared to a landline respondent from a comparison study of survey cost, and an unequal weighting effect from “Public Value and Electronic Governance.” The results suggested that the optimal design will have 64.18% of the sample completes from the landline frame, and 35.82% of the sample completes from the cellphone frame in a cell-phone-only screened design. Additionally, this paper shows that the sample sizes of cell phone only could be a function of unequal weight effect and survey cost. Thus, the organizer of the cell-phoneonly screened design could substitute parameters into the function depending on different situations.

Keywords

cellphone survey

effective sample size

survey cost

dual-frame telephone survey

unequal weighting effect