Case Study

College Students Attitudes to Cell-Phones Mixing BigEars with Web-based surveying - Anderson Analytics

Anderson Analytics finds that BigEars gets detailed and insightful qualitative data in a study of US college students' attitudes to cell-phones.

Anderson Analytics conducted a survey asking how college students feel about their cell phones. The hybrid study employed both the online and telephone survey methods in parallel.

"Consumers are becoming more and more aware of the value of their time. The key to maintaining a quality dialog with them, is to make it really convenient for them to engage, whenever and wherever they want". said Tom Anderson, Managing Partner of Anderson Analytics.

"Some people are more comfortable on the web, and some are more comfortable on the phone -by catering to these differences you can broaden participation" adds Jesse Chen, Senior Consultant and developer at Anderson Analytics.

The survey results indicated that a key advantage of using telephone surveys is its ability to encourage longer and more robust responses to open-ended questions. Answers given to open-ended questions over the phone were 15% longer than answers typed in an online survey. In addition, the voice recording offered opportunities for in-depth qualitative analysis; for example, emotion and inflection in voice of individual voice clips were used to examine the outliers in the study. Anderson found that BigEars surveys are a hybrid of survey and focus group methodologies, and can be a powerful tool for companies who need to conduct in-depth voice-of-customers studies.

The survey explored how college students feel about their cell phones. 34% of the students agreed that the cell phone is a reflection of their self-image. Among them, 50% expressed that their cell phone is an extension of their fashion sense and personal style, and their phone needs to be trendy and technologically up-to-date. The other 50% feel that their cell phone makes a statement about their practicality.

When choosing a new phone college students said that the look, phone style, and phone size are the primarily factors. Camera and various other functionalities such as text messaging came in as second tier priorities, followed by product/service and price. Almost no one mentioned the choice of games as an important factor. However, when asked about why they chose their current phone, cost was the predominant reason.