4 Common Myths About Mobile Respondents

Ipsos has completed a 3 leg multi-country mobile focused Research-on-Research program over the past 6 months to debunk them.

1. A mobile survey should never exceed 7 minutes.

Our RoR shows that globally surveys can be up to 15 minutes in length without any impact on drop out rates or data quality, abandon rates remaining low whatever the various interview lengths tested.

2. Mobile respondents do not behave the same as the general population.

Across devices, there were no meaningful differences / patterns in respondent attitudes, behaviors, and survey-taking behavior that would necessitate doing sampling differently.

3. Mobile respondents are usually on-the-go; taking surveys out of home, thus more distracted.

Actually there are more smartphone respondents who are taking surveys outside of traditional locations (i.e., home or work), but most still take the survey in traditional locations.

Even though more smartphone respondents are taking the survey outside of home/work, we can note that both groups (SMP and PC/tablets) are as much doing something else while completing the current survey, almost 50% each! Thus as much “Distracted".
4. Mobile respondents & surveys provide lower quality data.

Our RoR showed that mobile respondents were flagged less often as “potentially disengaged”.