Arbitron Compiles Cellphone Only Estimates

Ratings giant Arbitron has compiled population estimates for cellphone-only (CPO) households down to the local market level, and says it is the first firm to do so.

Arbitron began CPO sampling in April, when more than a third of a million households had been contacted to build the address-based sample. The company now plans to expand CPO sampling to all radio markets in the US, Alaska and Hawaii with its Fall 2009 survey.

Based on survey data from the firm's 151 diary markets, combined with the National Health Interview Survey, Arbitron estimates that CPO penetration rates vary from as low as 5% in Hamptons-Riverhead, New York to as high as 38% in Bryan-College Station, Texas.

The data indicates that there is a wide variation by region and market characteristics such as percent of the urban/suburban/rural population and age and ethnic distribution.

CPO sampling was introduced in the diary markets to enable measurement of people who cannot be reached by landline. All the firm's Portable People Meter (PPM) panels now include CPO-only households.

'We believe Arbitron is the first market researcher to track market-level cell-phone-only penetration,' said Bob Henrick, EVP of Customer Solutions. 'We use the county-level CPO penetration results from our sampling operations as a building block to produce metro-level CPO penetration estimates.'

Earlier in the year, Knowledge Networks integrated its address-based sampling
into the recruitment process for its custom research panel KnowledgePanel, in order to increase its representation of cellphone-only households, Hispanics and other groups.

Web site: www.arbitron.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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