Telephone surveys will be dead

Jay Leve, CEO of polling firm SurveyUSA, says we are seeing “the tail end” of the life cycle of telephone surveys.

Leve, whose firm specialises in automated telephone polls using recorded voices, told the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington DC last week that phone research “has proven to be an excellent method of data collection at the turn of the 21st century”, but that both live and recorded telephone surveys will not be able to survive for much longer.

“Ringing someone’s phone without warning and asking if they have 20 minutes to spend with you flies in the face of everything that’s going on in the world today”

There's more from Research Live here.

Good points. Survey research isn't that old, and it undergoes technological shifts every so often -- from face to face interviews to mail to phone via directories to random digit dialing, etc. Another paradigm shift is somewhere out there.