ANALYSING LANDLINE AND CELL-PHONE SURVEYS IN HEALTH STUDIES

Abstract

This work is a review of several estimation methods for dual-frame designs in the particular context of health telephone surveys. Due to the recent increase of the number of people who has no landline phone but only mobile phone, it is very important nowadays that telephone surveys incorporate landline together with cell-phone samples. Otherwise, large bias may appear in the estimations.
Given that the two frames made of landline owners and cell-phone owners intersect, some adapted estimation methods have to be used and there are several in the literature. The paper presents the different existing methods and compares these methods on a real health survey concerning the attitude of the Andalusian population regarding the public health system. The results suggest that the use of multiple frames might be useful in other health surveys where good estimates are wanted for both the whole population and particular subgroups at the same time.