An Empirical Test of the Impact of Smartphones on Panel-based Online Data Collection

Mobile devices such as Smartphones offer a wide variety of innovative research designs by means of new participation modes, interview occasions and data sources. This beneficial “intentional” use of mobile devices as data collection mode is counterbalanced by the potential threat to data quality by “unintentional mobile respondents”.

Unintentional mobile respondents participate in a conventional online survey per mobile device. Especially the limitations inherent to Smartphones in terms of display size and data entry comfort raise concerns regarding the usefulness of mobile participations. But a rejection of mobile survey accesses may decrease the accessibility of surveys causing systematic sample biases.