Cell phone use can skew research data

For those magazines which use telephone polling as a way of reaching or probing reader attitudes, a lonnnnggg study by Pew Research Centre in the U.S. found that the difficulty reaching cellphone-only households (about 7 t0 9%) so far makes relatively little difference (about 1%) to the ultimate results of random telephone surveys. However cellphone-only households tend to be younger, less affluent, less likely to be married, less likely to own their own home. So the trend may start to bite more in future. This may have implicaitons for publications and pollsters who are particularly interested in reaching and sampling young people.

Pew Research Center said in its own surveys over the past five years, the average percentage of those ages 18-34 in unweighted samples declined from 31% in 2000 to 20% through March 2006.