The Uses of Telephone Directories for Survey Sampling

Several recent publications 1-3 have discussed the use of random digit dialing to overcome the limitations of telephone directories due to unlisted numbers and new telephone installations. While these new procedures do not require the use of telephone directories, they do have problems of their own. In this article, we discuss methods for combining directory sampling with random digit dialing and some door-to-door listing to obtain various levels of sample quality. Surprisingly, some of the methods that use directories are not only higher in quality, but less expensive than methods that use random dialing or door-to-door listing exclusively.