ESTIMATING TELEPHONE NONCOVERAGE BIAS WITH A TELEPHONE SURVEY

Nontelephone households are implicitly treated as a static population in discussions of sampling frame noncoverage. Yet telephone service is known to be episodic for many households, who may gain or lose servic e as their financial situation changes or when they move. Thus the pop ulation of telephone households at any given time includes households that were recently a part of the nontelephone population. These househ olds may be used to characterize the nature of some noncoverage errors and even to estimate their magnitude. Using a panel constructed with the 1992-93 Current Population Survey, ''transient'' telephone househo lds-those who gained or lost service over the year covered by the pane l-are shown to comprise over half of the panel households reporting no telephone service in either the 1992 or 1993 surveys. These household s are compared with the total nonphone population and found to be simi lar on a variety of key demographic characteristics. Several statewide Virginia telephone surveys are used to compare households reporting ' 'intermittent'' phone service with nontelephone households surveyed th rough in-person interviews. Households reporting intermittent telephon e service were very similar to nontelephone households in terms of hea lth insurance coverage and other variables known to be related to tele phone status.