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The number of Americans with traditional telephones has declined sharply over the past three years — a trend with ramifications for phone surveys that inform policy and market research.

About one in eight households did not have a landline telephone in the first half of 2006, according to data the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention collected in its National Health Interview Survey. Three years earlier, it was about one in 20.

The percentage of adults using cell phones only was increasing 1 percentage point every six months from 2003 through 2005 but jumped 2 points in the most recent study, Stephen Blumberg, a senior scientist at the CDC, said Thursday.

Among all adults, 9.6 percent had only a cell phone in the first half of 2006, compared with 7.7 percent in the preceding six months. The overall number without landlines — 13.2 percent — includes those who have no phone at all.

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HUNG UP

The implications ultimately could affect government, academic, business and media surveys on politics, the economy, employment, health behaviors and many other topics. Recent research — including an Associated Press-Pew survey last fall of cell phone users as well as landline households — indicates the cell-phone-only crowd is not yet large enough and their views not different enough to affect the accuracy of traditional polling among the general population or voters.

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