Recall of past use of mobile phone handsets
Parslow RC, Hepworth SJ, McKinney PA. · 2003
View Original AbstractPeople overestimate their mobile phone use by up to 280%, undermining the reliability of EMF health studies based on self-reported exposure data.
Plain English Summary
UK researchers compared what 93 people reported about their mobile phone use to actual phone company records over 6 months. They found people consistently overestimated their phone usage by significant amounts - reporting 70% more calls and nearly 3 times longer talk time than actually occurred. This matters because most studies on mobile phone health effects rely on people accurately remembering and reporting their phone use, which this research shows may be unreliable.
Why This Matters
This validation study reveals a fundamental problem with EMF health research that relies on self-reported exposure data. When people overestimate their mobile phone use by factors of 1.7 to 2.8, it introduces significant measurement error that can mask real health effects or lead to incorrect exposure classifications in epidemiological studies. The science demonstrates that human memory for technology use is remarkably unreliable, yet many major studies examining links between mobile phones and brain tumors, sleep disruption, or other health effects depend entirely on questionnaire data. This measurement challenge helps explain why some EMF health studies produce inconsistent results. What this means for you is that the true health risks from mobile phone radiation may be underestimated in studies that rely on self-reported usage patterns, since actual exposures are likely lower than what participants remember and report.
Exposure Information
Specific exposure levels were not quantified in this study.
Study Details
Previous studies investigating health effects of mobile phones have based their estimation of exposure on self-reported levels of phone use. This UK validation study assesses the accuracy of reported voice calls made from mobile handsets.
Data collected by postal questionnaire from 93 volunteers was compared to records obtained prospecti...
Log-linear modelling produced similar results. The Spearman correlation coefficient was 0.48 for num...
These results suggest that self-reported mobile phone use may not fully represent patterns of actual use. This has implications for calculating exposures from questionnaire data.
Show BibTeX
@article{rc_2003_recall_of_past_use_2516,
author = {Parslow RC and Hepworth SJ and McKinney PA.},
title = {Recall of past use of mobile phone handsets},
year = {2003},
url = {https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14690324/},
}