The advancement of information and communication technologies has greatly changed the lifestyle of people while using landline surveys in soliciting precise public opinion is becoming limited. As people use a variety of devices such as cellphones, internet phones and APPs in daily communication, problems of insufficient population coverage arise from relying only on landline phones to reach respondents. Therefore, a daunting task in the telephone polling industry is to ensure sample representation for obtaining precise population parameters. To achieve such an objective, a common practice by pollsters in Taiwan is to use household data as
weighting statistics. Many cases, however, have shown this practice to be inappropriate.
To solve the above-mentioned problem, this study proposes an estimation method based on a dual frame survey that combines landline phones and cellphones. We further use data from the 2016 presidential election to compare different estimations based on a dual frame survey. Our results demonstrate that a “landline survey supplemented by cellphoneonly” is the best combination, considering sample coverage and estimation error. The second-best alternatives are “cellphone survey supplemented by landline-only” and “use both landline and cellphone.” In other words, “the most economical and efficient” strategy of a dual frame survey is to conduct a traditional landline survey and incorporating cellphone-only respondents. The data collected in such combination not only reflect the characteristics of the population, but also cost much less than other strategies.

In recent years, the internet has become more and more important in elections. Since the internet has become a major source of information for voters whilst also providing a platform for people to discuss politics, it can be concluded that the internet has a major impact on voters’ decisions. Therefore, it has become important for more studies to be focused on this phenomenon. Due to the social nature of the internet with the fast-paced societal changes which it brings about, this study uses a sociological approach of voting behavior to understanding this phenomenon. However, this does not suggest that the internet and new social media are eclipsing the more traditional forms of social contexts. Instead, this study suggests that new social media and social contexts are indicative of new and interesting changes taking place.

This study concentrates on the 2016 presidential election and specifically looks at different contextual factors. These include social environment, interpersonal discussion, traditional media and social media. This research conducted both a telephone survey and a web survey. After controlling for party identification, we find that interpersonal discussion and TV news have significant effects on voter choice in the telephone survey. Social media only showed their impact in the web survey. Our research suggests that we cannot ignore social context factors.