Poor-to-moderate agreement between self and proxy interviews of mobile phone use.
Hutter HP, Ehrenhöfer L, Freuis E, Hartl P, Kundi M. · 2012
View Original AbstractSpouses can't accurately report their partner's cell phone habits, undermining health studies that rely on proxy interviews.
Plain English Summary
Researchers studied how accurately people can report their partner's cell phone usage habits by having 119 couples fill out questionnaires about both their own and their partner's phone use. They found that partners were only moderately accurate (55% agreement) when estimating usage duration and were particularly poor at knowing which side of the head their partner held the phone during calls (accuracy only slightly better than guessing). This matters because many health studies rely on family members to provide phone usage information when patients are too ill to respond themselves.
Why This Matters
This research exposes a critical weakness in how we study cell phone health effects. Many epidemiological studies investigating links between mobile phone radiation and brain tumors rely on proxy interviews when patients are too sick to participate directly. The science demonstrates that spouses can't accurately report their partner's phone habits, particularly the crucial detail of which side of the head the phone is held against. What this means for you is that numerous studies claiming to find no health effects from cell phones may be fundamentally flawed due to inaccurate exposure data. When researchers can't properly measure how much radiation people actually received, their conclusions about safety become unreliable. The reality is that this measurement problem likely contributes to the inconsistent results we see across mobile phone health studies.
Exposure Information
Specific exposure levels were not quantified in this study.
Study Details
The aim of this study is to investigate Poor-to-moderate agreement between self and proxy interviews of mobile phone use.
We conducted a study of 119 heterosexual couples. Both partners answered two questionnaires about mo...
The only item with good agreement was whether or not a prepaid phone was used (Cohen's kappa 0.78 an...
We conclude that the assessment of mobile phone use by proxy data cannot be relied on except for information about onset of mobile phone use, use of prepaid or contract phones, and, to a lesser degree, duration of daily use. Agreement concerning the important information about side of the head the mobile phone is held during calls was poorest and only slightly better than chance.
Show BibTeX
@article{hp_2012_poortomoderate_agreement_between_self_2216,
author = {Hutter HP and Ehrenhöfer L and Freuis E and Hartl P and Kundi M.},
title = {Poor-to-moderate agreement between self and proxy interviews of mobile phone use.},
year = {2012},
url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22495617/},
}