The Push Toward Automation
Caller ID and call screening have made live interviewing increasingly difficult and expensive, accelerating the industry’s movement toward self-administered survey modes. CERC’s question was not simply whether text-based research is cheaper or easier, but what changes when researchers move away from mixed-mode studies and rely exclusively on text invitations.
A Live Field Comparison
CERC compared two voter studies conducted just weeks apart. The mixed-mode study included 802 voters contacted through text, phone, and email; the text-only study included 307 voters contacted entirely by text. Both studies used comparable weighting parameters and shared key measures of civic mood and elected-official approval.
Different Modes Reach Different People
Although the studies drew from the same underlying voter-data environment, meaningful differences emerged in both the available contact frame and the respondents who ultimately participated. Textable voters differed from those without usable mobile numbers, while the completed text-only sample also differed from the electorate in ways that required greater weighting adjustments.
The Opt-In Factor
CERC’s central hypothesis is that a text invitation creates a stronger self-selection barrier: recipients must actively decide that they want to take a survey. Phone respondents, by contrast, are contacted proactively and may not initially know that the call is a survey. Skilled interviewers can therefore bring less-engaged respondents into the research process—respondents who may be systematically missing from text-only samples.
Why It Matters
Text-based research is cheaper—the presentation notes that CERC’s profit margin on the text-based study was 13% higher—but the findings suggest a potential tradeoff in data quality. CERC’s conclusion is not that researchers should reject self-administered methods, but that they should understand and disclose the tradeoffs and optimize across modes rather than reflexively eliminating live interviewers.
Is America truly becoming more polarized… or is it just a mode effect?
