Disappearing land lines

On Friday I was presenting to the inaugural Danish Market Research Evening in Copenhagen, which was a follow-up to the Swedish Market Research Day, which was held on the Thursday in Stockholm. One of the first papers was an interesting presentation by Jakob Preisler of Zapera.

One of Preisler’s early slides showed how members of panels are drawn from a small pool of the population. The first slice that Preisler removed was the 8% who do not have access to phones (panels in Denmark are frequently recruited by phone) – by which Presisler was referring principally to the socially excluded and the odd.

However, it seemed to me that Presiler was potentially missing another group, households that have a mobile phone but no land line. I asked one or two Danish researchers during the coffee break about this issue, and they felt that these households would be pretty rare in Denmark. This seemed unlikely to me, so at the start of my presentation (after the coffee break) I started by asking the audience a question.

I asked the room of about 140 delegates “How many of you live in a house, flat or apartment which has one or more mobile phones, but no land lines?” Almost half the room put their hands up!

We all need to be aware that land lines are becoming rarer.