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Reducing overestimation in reported mobile phone use associated with epidemiological studies.

No Effects Found

Tokola K, Kurttio P, Salminen T, Auvinen A. · 2008

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People overestimate their cell phone use by about 100%, undermining the reliability of most mobile phone health studies.

Plain English Summary

Summary written for general audiences

Researchers compared what 70 people said about their cell phone use in interviews versus actual usage data from phone companies. They found people consistently overestimated how much they used their phones, reporting about twice as much talk time as the records showed. This matters because most studies on cell phone health effects rely on people accurately remembering and reporting their usage, which this study shows they don't do well.

Study Details

We assessed the validity of self-reported mobile phone use and developed a statistical model to account for the over-reporting of exposure.

We collected information on mobile phone use from 70 volunteers using two sources of data: self-repo...

No significant improvement in the model fit was achieved by including potential predictors of accura...

Cite This Study
Tokola K, Kurttio P, Salminen T, Auvinen A. (2008). Reducing overestimation in reported mobile phone use associated with epidemiological studies. Bioelectromagnetics. 29(7):559-563, 2008.
Show BibTeX
@article{k_2008_reducing_overestimation_in_reported_3446,
  author = {Tokola K and Kurttio P and Salminen T and Auvinen A.},
  title = {Reducing overestimation in reported mobile phone use associated with epidemiological studies.},
  year = {2008},
  
  url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18521851/},
}

Quick Questions About This Study

Researchers compared what 70 people said about their cell phone use in interviews versus actual usage data from phone companies. They found people consistently overestimated how much they used their phones, reporting about twice as much talk time as the records showed. This matters because most studies on cell phone health effects rely on people accurately remembering and reporting their usage, which this study shows they don't do well.