Measuring mobile phone use: Gender, age and real usage level in relation to the accuracy and validity of self-reported mobile phone use

Abstract

This article reports the results of a mobile phone use validation survey in which we compared self-reported mobile phone use to network provider data, and examined the observed discrepancies between both data sources in a convenience sample of 466 Flemish mobile phone users (18–65 years). The results showed significant discrepancies between self-reported and behavioral mobile phone use, particularly for the number and duration of mobile calls. Light users tended to overestimate, while heavy users tended to underestimate their mobile phone use. Females were more likely to underestimate their weekly number of calls. Younger adults were more accurate in reporting their weekly number of calls, but less accurate in reporting their weekly number of text messages. The discussion devotes particular attention to potential question wording effects that are likely to have influenced the results.

How Much Time Do You Spend Online? Understanding and Improving the Accuracy of Self-Reported Measures of Internet Use

“…These findings correspond to previous research that has found low levels of measurement correspondence and tendencies of over-reporting for internet use (Scharkow, 2016). This pattern has also been found to apply for other media use behavior, such as the use of social media (Junco, 2013) or mobile phones (Vanden Abeele et al, 2013).…”

“…Particularly, those with higher levels of actual internet use as well as tablet users showed lower levels of over-reporting and, accordingly, higher levels of under-reporting and, thus, clearly deviated from the general tendencies of over-reporting. Related to this point and also in line with previous findings, the variance in the self-reported measures was smaller compared to the actual behavior which could imply a lower explanatory power of self-reported measures of internet use (Scharkow, 2016;Vanden Abeele et al, 2013;Wonneberger & Irazoqui, 2016). Corroborating these previous studies, actual internet use was identified as a main driver for this phenomenon: Greater levels of internet use were associated to higher levels of underreporting and lower levels of internet use to higher levels of over-reporting.…”

“…Specifically, concerning the influence of the amount of media use on response accuracy previous research has yielded consistent findings for TV exposure (Wonneberger & Irazoqui, 2017), mobile phone use (Vanden Abeele, Beullens, & Roe, 2013) as well as for internet use (Scharkow, 2016). The general pattern here is that light users have a tendency to over-report while heavy users have a tendency to under-report their use of the medium in question.…”

SMS use intensity changes in the age of ubiquitous mobile Internet access – A two-level investigation of residential mobile communications customers in Germany

“…First, subjective self-reports of usage intensities of SMS and MI services in general or IP-based mobile instant messaging applications in particular share very limited variance with objective behavioral data derived from traffic measurement or billing systems of MNO or software clients installed on smartphones to capture customer service use patterns (Van den Abeele et al, 2013;Boase and Ling, 2013;Gerpott, 2011;. Thus, self-assessments of use intensities of mobile communication services' inaccurately reflect actual customer behaviors.…”

Understanding workers’ adoption of productivity mobile applications: a fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)

“…Previous work has shown significant differences between the self-responses of research participants and their actual behaviour, especially in the number and duration of mobile calls (Vanden Abeele, Beullens, & Roe, 2013). Other studies have also shown that due to the large number of applications that the user may have installed, the user may find it difficult to enumerate all the installed applications and their daily use (Xu et al, 2016), thereby ruling out the possibility of introducing biases of answers by social desirability.…”