Building on Tradition: How Advanced Cellular Frame Adds Diversity to RDD

On January 19, 2022January 20, 2022 By MSG BloggerIn Genesys, MSGLeave a comment

Is it possible to take traditional RDD cellular telephone sampling and make it better? The answer is yes, thanks to one of our newer products, Advanced Cellular Frame (ACF).

Advanced Cellular Frame is built upon the traditional RDD frame. It takes all possible telephone numbers in the RDD frame and adds something more. This makes for a much more versatile sampling tool, both for doing RDD and a targeted sample.

How is ACF Compiled?

Think of it as one database with two components inside. First, there’s the matched component. In the old days, this was known as “Listed.” Second, there’s “everything else”: the unmatched, unlisted, unassigned telephone numbers.

We take the original RDD frame, which includes every single thousand block that was dedicated to cellular servers. Next, we identify all the telephone numbers from a set of half a billion or so. We advance the frame by attaching as much ancillary data to the numbers as we can: names, addresses, individual demographics, household demographics, and geography.

Let’s say you’d like to do a targeted sample. For that, we would go into the database and fish out those telephone numbers matching the specific geographic and demographic criteria that you are targeting.

If you want to do an RDD, we go in and include everything within the geography you are sampling. All numbers have an equal probability of selection both from the listed (matched) component and the unlisted component.

KEEPING DATA FRESH

The database is updated quarterly. It’s true that with any database on the marketplace, there’s always going to be aging. There will be lag time between the vendor compiled data and loading it into a production environment. We compensate for the lag by sending selected telephone numbers out for a real-time name and an address append.

Because people tend to move over time for one reason or another, this method ensures that we are appending the most current information available in terms of names and addresses, for the sample we provide.

ADDRESSING THE MIGRATION PROBLEM

So, what happens when for example, a person in the listed portion (name and address) was geocoded, but that person actually moved? Many of these people will have carried their existing telephone number from one geography to the new one. Will Advanced Cellular Frame RDD move that number to the new frame?

Yes, the person will be identified based off the new address. That’s the beauty of the ACF frame. It does an excellent job at addressing migration. You can include for your target geography (like a state) all phone numbers from all area codes across the country of people who it so turns out have actually moved into that geography.

The converse is true as well. Anyone who has moved out of state will be excluded from the frame.

This improves your coverage and the quality of data collection and cuts down on collection costs.

HOW ACCURATE IS ACF?

Advanced Cellular Frame pulls on new technology to try to accurately link a telephone number to a name and address. It utilizes ID authentication, the technology used to validate transactions online. That information is used to help clean up and tighten up the ACF frame, which significantly boosts the matching accuracy.

WHAT ABOUT WORKING RATE?

You would expect a 75% to 80% overall working rate in ACF. That working rate jumps up to about 95% within the listed portion because there’s so much information known about those telephone numbers that they’re actually known to be working. The result is a much higher working rate than a traditional RDD frame.

LEARN MORE

To learn more about ACF, click here and check out the first video episode of our YouTube series “Coffee Quip” an informal series of information talks with a panel of MSG experts. In this episode, Hillary McDonough, Raj Bhai, and Greg Pizzola chat about Advanced Cellular Frame with subject matter expert David Malarek, Senior Vice President of sampling and database services.

Taking Aim with Consumer Cellular Sample

On June 29, 2017September 4, 2019 By MSG BloggerIn Genesys, MSGLeave a comment

How Consumer Cellular Sample Can Give You a More Accurate Geographic Fit of your Target Population and Improve Coverage

Geo-targeting. We all know what it means, but for the sake of this article, let’s get at the essence of the concept. Geo-targeting is a way to pinpoint an audience based on location. Accuracy is everything. Geography is the fundamental basis for every sample frame – be it individual streets, Census geography or Postal geography. Continue reading “Taking Aim with Consumer Cellular Sample” →

Split-Frame Sampling

On September 17, 2015 By Ashley HyonIn Genesys, MSG1 Comment

Oftentimes, researchers are faced with the challenging task of targeting rare domains in a population while maintaining the probability-based nature of the employed sample. For instance, in a national RDD sample it might be necessary to oversample households with small children or those with even less prevalent attributes. While an epsem sampling design, whereby all numbers have the same chance of selection, will provide the most efficient sample with respect to the precision of survey estimates, from a cost perspective such a design can be completely prohibitive due to the required level of screening for reaching eligible households. This is where a cleverly designed stratified sampling alternative that employs disproportional allocation can prove highly valuable.

In practice, an optimal sample allocation scheme takes into account the unit cost per interview in each sampling stratum. As such, a stratum with a high incidence of reaching members of the target population will receive a higher allocation as compared to other strata. This disproportionate sample allocation should be exercised while providing a non-zero chance of selection for all telephone numbers to ensure a probability-based sample.

The objective of this stratification is to provide a means for over sampling the target populations by segregating higher incidence households into distinct sampling strata. This is done by matching all numbers against commercial databases, which contain household and individual level demographic data, and identifying the numbers that meet the specified target.

With access to all the top commercial databases Marketing Systems Group can provide cost-effective solutions for sample surveys that aim to target rare domains. By placing such telephone numbers in the “top” or high incidence stratum and the remaining telephone numbers covering the geography of interest in another, you can create a complete sampling frame. Subsequently, using an optimization procedure a higher sampling fraction will be determined for the top stratum cognizant of the design effect that will result from a disproportional sample allocation and will need to be adjusted for when weighting.