I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
New Mexico ranks ninth in the percentage of households that are cell-phone only, according to a study by the Center for Disease Control (CDC).
The study says that 21.1 percent of New Mexican households and 20.5 percent of adults in the state are cell-phone only. As KSFR notes, “The federal report in the past has convinced many political pollsters to expand their techniques.”
The study, taken from 2006-2007, shows that Oklahoma leads the pack, with Utah close behind. There are eleven states that have more than 20 percent of households without a landline. Nebraska, Arkansas, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Texas, South Carolina and Tennessee (and the District of Columbia) join Utah, Oklahoma and New Mexico.
“The estimate from the first half of 2008, that 17.5% of households were wireless-only, is nearly 3 percentage points higher than the estimate for the 2007 calendar year (14.7%),” the study says in its conclusion. “Similarly, the estimated prevalence of wireless-only adults has grown from 13.6% in 2007 to 16.1% in the first half of 2008.”
In other words, the number of households without landlines are a growing minority.
And, in fact, it may be even larger than the numbers show. “It is very likely that the current state-level prevalence rates of wireless-only households and adults are greater than the estimates presented here,” the CDC report states.
This poses a unique problem for pollsters, as New Mexico Independent wrote in August. “Just a few years ago, pollsters gained virtually nothing by dialing mobile phone numbers, since virtually all mobile phone users also had ‘wired’ home telephone service,” Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com told NMI.
So what are the problems in polling cell-phone-only households? Again from the August story:
Although this is not the case today, pollsters do face legislative restrictions when trying to reach cell phone users. The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 prohibits the use of autodialers when calling cell phone users, a method that large polling agencies rely on to reach their sample.
I would expect, or at least hope, that FiveThirtyEight or Pollster takes a closer look at this study and the implications on polling cell-phone only blogs.
Oh, and as for the folks at NMI, a majority of us are in the “cell-phone-only” category.
