Teens and Mobile Phones

Text messaging has become the primary way that American teenagers communicate with their friends, surpassing face-to-face contact, email, instant messaging and voice calling. According to the latest research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months to 54% texting daily in September 2009. And it's not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month, and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.

Selected findings:

• Some 75% of 12-17 year-olds now own cell phones, up from 45% in 2004. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns.
  
• Boys typically send and receive 30 texts a day; girls typically send and receive 80 messages per day.
  
• Teen texters ages 12-13 typically send and receive 20 texts a day whilst 14-17 year-olds typically send and receive 60 text messages a day.
  
• 21% of teens who do not otherwise go online say they access the internet on their cell phone.
  
• 41% of teens from households earning less than $30,000 annually say they go online with their cell phone. Only 70% of teens in this income category have a computer in the home, compared with 92% of families from households that earn more.

Click here for the full report

Photo from Creative Commons: Flickr: Brandon Christopher Warren

Comments

[medical consultation]

yes, texting is very popular now a days to every teens. it is the way of communication they using to their friends, relatives that they haven't seen for a long time, instead of mailing mails texting is the easy and fastest of exchanging communication.sometimes courting someone can happened in text.

[Katherine]

Yes this is true. Teens are the number user of cellphones. Further more they are not into calls but instead texting is popular with them. Another popular thing to the teens is that they are more into social networking like facebook and twitter. They can communicate easily with this set-up.