Number Verification

The verification of a telephone number in a telephone survey is done by an interviewer who confirms with a respondent that the number that was ostensibly dialed is in fact the number that was reached. The need to do this has been reduced over the years as more landline telephone surveys have come to be conducted with computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) systems that include software and hardware to place the calls to the sampled telephone numbers, as opposed to having interviewers manually dial the numbers. However, the need for number verification has not been eliminated completely, as even with automatic dialing equipment mistakes sometimes occur. Furthermore, in the United States and due to current federal telecommunications regulations, all cell phone numbers that are sampled for ...