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Updated State-Level Wireless Substitution Estimates Released

April 20, 2011

April 20, 2011:  The National Center for Health Statistics has released updated state-level wireless substitution estimates.  The report, "Wireless Substitution: State-level Estimates From the National Health Interview Survey, January 2007-June 2010," provides model-based state-level estimates of the percentage of adults and children living in households that did not have a landline telephone but did have at least one wireless telephone.

Nationwide, estimates for the July 2009 through June 2010 period indicate that 23.9% of adults and 27.5% of children were living in these wireless-only households.  The report also presents estimates for selected U.S. counties and groups of counties, for other household telephone service use categories (e.g., those that had only landlines and those that had landlines yet received all or almost all calls on wireless telephones), and for 12-month time periods since January-December 2007.

This work is important for survey research. As more and more households drop their landline service it will be more expensive and difficult to capture wireless-only households in surveys (see SHADAC's issue brief on this topic for more information).  These state-level estimates provide a tool for researchers to understand the impact and develop techniques to adjust techniques for data collection and post-stratification weighting.

SHADAC Research Assistant Michel Boudreaux and Research Fellow Karen Soderberg were contributing authors on this report.