While shopping at Lowe’s last Saturday, I received a call soliciting me to participate in the survey. Having been part of of a nationally-recognized research center which conduct survey, this is interesting because i have never been part of one.
When I first got this survey, I was ready to say “No thank you” and put the phone down. This is a message that I have been preaching to my family members. Since I was waiting for my family member to survey the store, I paid more attention to the caller and asked questions although the background in the store was a little noisy.
It turned out that it’s a BRFSS survey, which I have considered to utilize in graduate school. I passed the prerequisite and then the survey begun. The interviewer inquired about my self-reported health status, health checkup, shots, physical and mental limitation, etc.
One thing that struck me is that they are calling cellphone nowadays. From work experience, I know that cell-phone is excluded from telemarketer’s Call List* that we don’t have to place them in the Do-Not-Call list – which is one of the reasons for us not to have a land-line phone. The interview doesn’t sound fake like the one the deceit that was around years ago.
Calling people on their cell-phone on a Saturday is definitely a good tactic to obtain a better representative of American adults. Many surveys have tended to call people from their land-line number. I am not sure why but I suppose its due to sampling list in attempt to avoid getting individuals of the same household (who tend to be correlated in the behaviors).
Anyways, I aswered all the answered questions except for the Zipcode. Given some of the information that I have provided, had I provided Zipcode people could have easily identify me (although I doubt that Zipcode will be int he public database). I didn’t complete the survey but they should call me back. Perhaps then, I could jolt down the name of NM’s BRFSS Director’s mentioned earlier in the survey to check its legitimacy.
* Thinking back, some of my friends have receive calls from telemarketers at their cellphone number.
