Household Telephone Service and Usage Patterns in the U.s. in 2004

The percentage of households in the U.S. with a telephone is an important determinant of coverage in random digit dial (RDD) telephone surveys and also affects the efficiency of using the telephone as a mode of data collection in household surveys. In earlier years, RDD coverage issues were mainly concerned with households without phones because having a telephone in the household was nearly equivalent to having landline telephone service. As the percentage of households with only cell phones has increased, the difference between not having any telephone service and not having a landline is more important since virtually all RDD samples are selected from telephone exchanges that exclude cell phones. Members of households that have only cell phones are not covered under this traditional sampling procedure.