Text messaging is a
surprisingly good way to get candid responses to sensitive questions, according
to a new study to be presented at the annual meeting of the American
Association for Public Opinion Research.
“The preliminary
results of our study suggest that people are more likely to disclose sensitive
information via text messages than in voice interviews,” said Fred Conrad,
a cognitive psychologist and director of the Program in Survey Methodology at
the University of
Michigan Institute for Social
Research.
“This is sort of
surprising since many people thought that texting would decrease the likelihood
of disclosing sensitive information because it creates a persistent, visual
record of questions and answers that others might see on your phone and in the
cloud.”
With text, the researchers
also found that people were less likely to engage in “satisficing”—a
survey industry term referring to the common practice of giving good enough,
easy answers, like rounding to multiples of 10 in numerical responses, for
example.
“We believe people
give more precise answers via texting because there’s just not the time
pressure in a largely asynchronous mode like text that there is in phone
interviews,” Conrad said. “As a result, respondents are able to take
longer to arrive at more accurate answers.”
Conrad conducted the study
with Michael Schober, a professor psychology and dean of the graduate faculty
at The New School for Social Research. Their research team included cognitive
psychologists, psycholinguists, survey methodologists and computer scientists
from both universities, as well as collaborators from AT&T Research.
Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation.
“We’re in the early
stages of analyzing our findings,” Schober said. “But so far it seems
that texting may reduce some respondents’ tendency to shade the truth or to
present themselves in the best possible light in an interview—even when they
know it’s a human interviewer they are communicating with via text. What we
cannot yet be sure of is who is most likely to be disclosive in text. Is it
different for frequent texters, or generational, for example?”
For the study, the
researchers recruited approximately 600 iPhone-users on Craigslist, through
Google Ads, and from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, offering them iTunes Store
incentives to participate in the study. Their goals were to see whether
responses to the same questions differed depending on several variables:
whether the questions were asked via text or voice, whether a human or a
computer asked the questions, and whether the environment, including the
presence of other people and the likelihood of multitasking, affected the
answers.
Among the questions that
respondents answered more honestly via text than speech: In a typical week,
about how often do you exercise? During the past 30 days, on how many days did
you have five or more drinks on the same occasion?
And among the questions
that respondents answered more precisely via text, providing fewer rounded
numerical responses: During the last month, how many movies did you watch in
any medium? How many songs do you currently have on your iPhone?
According to Conrad and
Schober, changes in communication patterns and their impact on the survey
industry prompted the study. About one in five U.S. households only use cell
phones and no longer have landline phones. These households are typically not
surveyed even though cell-only households tend to differ in important ways from
households with landline phones. More people are using text messages on mobile
phones, with texting now the preferred form of communication among many people
in their teens and 20s in the United
States. Texting is extremely common among
all age groups in many Asian and European nations.
Conrad and Schober are also
finding that people are more likely to provide thoughtful and honest responses
via text messages even when they’re in busy, distracting environments.
“This is the case even
though people are more likely to be multitasking—shopping or walking, for
example—when they’re answering questions by text than when they’re being
interviewed by voice,” Conrad said.
