MARCH 19, 2012 Teens, Smartphones & Texting

[Pages:34]MARCH 19, 2012

Teens, Smartphones & Texting

Texting volume is up while the frequency of voice calling is down. About one in four teens say they own smartphones.

Amanda Lenhart Senior Research Specialist, Pew Internet Project

Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project 1615 L St., NW ? Suite 700 Washington, D.C. 20036 Phone: 202-419-4500

Summary of findings

The volume of texting among teens has risen from 50 texts a day in 2009 to 60 texts for the median teen text user. Older teens, boys, and blacks are leading the increase. Texting is the dominant daily mode of communication between teens and all those with whom they communicate.

The typical American teen is sending and receiving a greater number of texts than in 2009. Overall, 75% of all teens text. Here are the key findings about the role of texting in teens' lives:

The median number of texts (i.e. the midpoint user in our sample) sent on a typical day by teens 12-17 rose from 50 in 2009 to 60 in 2011.

Much of this increase occurred among older teens ages 14-17, who went from a median of 60 texts a day to a median of 100 two years later. Boys of all ages also increased their texting volume from a median of 30 texts daily in 2009 to 50 texts in 2011. Black teens showed an increase of a median of 60 texts per day to 80.

Older girls remain the most enthusiastic texters, with a median of 100 texts a day in 2011, compared with 50 for boys the same age.

63% of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. This far surpasses the frequency with which they pick other forms of daily communication, including phone calling by cell phone (39% do that with others every day), face-to-face socializing outside of school (35%), social network site messaging (29%), instant messaging (22%), talking on landlines (19%) and emailing (6%).

The frequency of teens' phone chatter with friends ? on cell phones and landlines ? has fallen. But the heaviest texters are also the heaviest talkers with their friends.

Teens' phone conversations with friends are slipping in frequency.

14% of all teens say they talk daily with friends on a landline, down from 30% who said so in 2009. Nearly a third (31%) of teens say they never talk on a landline with friends (or report that they cannot do so).

26% of all teens (including those with and without cell phones) say they talk daily with friends on their cell phone, down from 38% of teens in 2009.

However, the Pew Internet survey shows that the heaviest texters are also the heaviest talkers. The heaviest texters (those who exchange more than 100 texts a day) are much more likely than lighter texters to say that they talk on their cell phone daily. Some 69% of heavy texters talk daily on their cell phones, compared with 46% of medium texters (those exchanging 21-100 texts a day) and 43% of light texters (those exchanging 0-20 texts a day).

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About one in four teens report owning a smartphone.

Smartphones are gaining teenage users. Some 23% of all those ages 12-17 say they have a smartphone and ownership is highest among older teens: 31% of those ages 14-17 have a smartphone, compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13. There are no differences in ownership of smartphones versus regular cell phones by race, ethnicity, or income. Teens whose parents have a college education are slightly more likely than teens whose parents have a high school diploma or less to have a smartphone (26% vs. 19%).

Smartphone owners are the most likely to have used a tablet computer to go online in the last month.

Overall, 16% of all teens have used a tablet computer to go online in the last 30 days and smartphone owners are also the most likely to be tablet users. Some 30% of smartphone users have used tablets to go online in the past month, while 13% of regular phone users and 9% of those without cell phones have done the same. Fewer smartphone users have used the internet on a desktop or laptop computer in the last month than regular phone users (85% vs. 93%.)

Three quarters of teens ? 77% ? have cell phones. Ownership among younger teens has dropped since 2009.

Overall, 77% of those ages 12-17 have a cell phone. The percentage of younger teens ages 12 and 13 with cell phones has declined slightly since 2009; 57% of younger teens owned cell phones in 2011, compared with 66% in 2009.

6% of all American teens use cell phone-based location services.

Location-based services are applications (like Foursquare or Gowalla) or features on platforms (like Facebook or Twitter) that let a user "check in" to a location or share their location with friends. Overall, 6% of all American teens use location-based services on their cell phones.

18% of smartphone owners in the sample had shared their location, compared with 8% of regular phone owners and 2% of all other teens.

Older teens ages 14 to 17 are more likely to use location-based services (9%) than 12 and 13year-olds, of whom less than 1% report using a location-based service.

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Acknowledgements

The project would like to thank its research partners, Cable in the Classroom and the Family Online Safety Institute for their generous support of this project.

About the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project is one of seven projects that make up the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, nonprofit "fact tank" that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. The Project produces reports exploring the impact of the internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life. The Pew Internet Project takes no positions on policy issues related to the internet or other communications technologies. It does not endorse technologies, industry sectors, companies, nonprofit organizations, or individuals. While we thank our research partners for their helpful guidance, the Pew Internet Project had full control over the design, implementation, analysis and writing of this survey. The presentation of these findings, as well as any omissions or errors, is the author's responsibility alone.

About Cable in the Classroom

Cable in the Classroom (CIC), the national education foundation of the U.S. cable industry, advocates for digital citizenship and the visionary, sensible, and effective use of cable's broadband technology, services, and content in teaching and learning. Since 1989, CIC has also supported the complimentary provision, by cable companies and programmers, of broadband and multichannel video services and educational content to the nation's schools. For more information, visit .

About the Family Online Safety Institute

The Family Online Safety Institute is an international, non-profit organization which works to make the online world safer for kids and their families. FOSI convenes leaders in industry, government and the non-profit sectors to collaborate and innovate new solutions and policies in the field of online safety. Through research, resources, events and special projects, FOSI

promotes a culture of responsibility online and encourages a sense of digital citizenship for all. FOSI's members include: AOL, AT&T, BAE Systems Detica, BT Retail, Comcast, Disney, Entertainment Software Association, Facebook, France Telecom, Google, GSM Association, Microsoft, Motion Picture Association of America, NCTA, Nominum, Optenet, RuleSpace, Sprint, Symantec, Time Warner Cable, Telecom Italia, Telef?nica, TELMEX, USTelecom, The Wireless Foundation, Verizon and Yahoo!. For more information, visit .

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Introduction

Teens are fervent communicators. Straddling childhood and adulthood, they communicate frequently with a variety of important people in their lives: friends and peers, parents, teachers, coaches, bosses, and a myriad of other adults and institutions. This report examines the tools teens use to communicate, with a particular focus on mobile devices, and then places the use of those tools in the broader context of how teens choose to communicate with people in their lives.

What follows are the findings from a study conducted by the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project in partnership with the Family Online Safety Institute and supported by Cable in the Classroom. The data discussed in this report are the result of a three-part, multi-modal study that included interviews with experts, seven focus groups with middle and high school students, and a nationally representative random-digit-dial telephone survey of teens and parents. The survey was fielded April 19 through July 14, 2011, and was administered by landline and cell phone, in English and Spanish, to 799 teens ages 12-17 and a parent or guardian. Black and Latino families were oversampled.1 The margin of error for the full sample is ?5 percentage points.2

Cell phone ownership

Overall cell ownership steady since 2009

According to the Pew Internet Project's 2011 teen survey, three quarters (77%) of teens have a cell phone, a figure that is similar to the 75% of teens who owned a cell phone in September 2009 and up dramatically from the 45% of teens who were cell owners in late 2004.

Older teens ages 14 to 17 are substantially more likely to have a cell phone than younger teens ages 12 and 13 ? 87% of older teens have a cell phone, compared with 57% of younger teens. Since 2009, the number of older teens with mobile phones has increased from 80%, while the percentage of younger teens with cell phones has declined slightly, from 66% in 2009.

In 2011, the youngest boys are the least likely of the groups to have a mobile phone ? just under half (47%) have a cell phone, compared with 67% of girls 12 to 13 and 85% of older girls and 88% of older boys. There are no differences in phone ownership between boys and girls overall, as was the case in 2009 as well.

White teens are more likely to have a cell phone than Latino teens (81% vs. 63%). Teens with parents who have a high school education or greater are more likely than teens whose parents lack a high school diploma to have a cell phone. And teens from the highest income households ? where families earn more than $75,000 annually ? are more likely than any other income bracket to own a mobile phone.

1 For more details about the impact of oversampling on this study, please visit:

2 For more details about how the study was conducted, please see the Methodology section at the end of this report.

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Suburban teens are more likely than urban teens to have a mobile phone (83% vs. 69%). Teen social media users are more likely than others to have a mobile phone (82% have one vs. 69% of those who do not use social media).

Who has a cell phone?

% of teens within each group who have a cell phone

All teens (n=799) Gender Boys (n=391) Girls (n=408) Age 12-13 (n=225) 14-17 (n=574) Race/Ethnicity White, non-Hispanic (n=442) Black, non-Hispanic (n=123) Hispanic (English- and Spanish-speaking) (n=172) Household Income Less than $30,000 (n=192) $30,000-$49,999 (n=111) $50,000-$74,999 (n=119) $75,000+ (n=304) Education level of parents Less than high school (n=89) High school grad (n=171) Some college (n=179) College+ (n=357) Community type Urban (n=279) Suburban (n=397) Rural (n=96)

Note: * indicates statistically significant difference between rows. **indicates a data point that is significant with regards to all other data points in the row section.

Source: The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project Teen/Parent Survey, April 19 ? July 14, 2011. n=799 teens ages 12-17 and a parent or guardian. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish, on landlines and cell phones.

77%

76 78

57* 87*

81* 72 63*

62 75 72 91**

47** 82 79 82

69* 83* 73

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23% of teens have a smartphone.

One quarter (23%) of teens 12 to 17 indicate that their phone is a smartphone, while 54% have a regular cell phone (or are not sure what kind of phone they have), and another 23% of teens do not have a cell phone at all. Using a different series of questions to measure smartphone ownership,3 we found that 46% of adults report having a smartphone of some kind in early March 2012.

Smartphone ownership is highest among older teens, as 31% of teens ages 14-17 have a smartphone, compared with just 8% of youth ages 12-13. The data suggest a cell phone ownership evolution by age. The youngest teens are the least likely to own a cell phone of any kind at all. Early high-school aged teens (14 and 15-year-olds) are much more likely to have a cell phone, but that phone is more likely to be a regular phone than a smartphone. The oldest high schoolers (16 and 17-year-olds) are the most likely to have a cell phone, and have that cell phone be a smartphone, though even they are still somewhat more likely to have a regular phone than a smartphone. Teens with parents with a college education are slightly more likely than teens with parents with a high school diploma or less to have a smartphone (26% vs. 19%).

As with adults, smartphone-owning teens are avid users of a number of social media applications--91% of teen smartphone owners use social networking sites, and 25% are Twitter users compared with 77% of teens without smartphones who use social network sites and 13% who use Twitter.

While there are no differences in ownership of smartphones compared with regular cell phones by race, ethnicity or income, some groups do express more uncertainty about whether their phone should be classified as a smartphone. Latino youth with cell phones are more likely than white youth with cells to say they are not sure whether their phone is smartphone (24% of Latino youth with cell phones say they are not sure, compared with 10% of white teens with phones). Among cell phone owners, teens from families earning less than $30,000 annually and teens with parents without college experience are both more likely to say they're not sure whether their phone is a smartphone or not.

Smartphone owners are much more likely than other teens to have gone online on mobile phones & tablets in the last 30 days.

Overall, half (49%) of all American teens have gone online on their mobile phones in the last 30 days. Not surprisingly given the affordances of the technology they possess, a whopping 92% of teen smartphone owners have gone online in the past 30 days on a cell phone. Comparatively, 40% of teens with regular cell phones have used a cell phone to go online in the last 30 days. Even a quarter of teens

3 In the teen survey, teens were first asked "Do you have a cell phone or a Blackberry, iPhone or other device that is also a cell phone?" and then yes responses were asked "Is that a smartphone or not....or are you not sure?" The adult smartphone question began "Do you have a cell phone or a Blackberry or iPhone or other device that is also a cell phone?" and then followed yeses with "Some phones are called "smartphones" because of certain features they have. Is your cell phone a smartphone or not, or are you not sure? Adults were then asked about the properties of their mobile phone ? and those who had responded no to the smartphone question, but whose responses indicated that they owned a phone with smartphone capabilities were then added to the adult tally of smartphone owners. More details on adults and smartphones may be found in "Nearly half of American adults are smartphone owners" report, available at .

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who do not have their own cell phone have used one to go online in the last month ? potentially by borrowing the phone of a friend, parent or sibling.

In the last 30 days, have you used the internet on ____?

% of all teens

Desktop or laptop computer

88

Cell phone

49

Mp3 player or iPod

34

Game console

30

Tablet computer or iPad

16

0

20

40

60

80

100

Source: The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, April 19 ? July 14, 2011 Teen Survey. n=799 teens 12-17 and a parent or guardian. Interviews were conducted in English and Spanish, by landline and cell phone, and included an oversample of minority families.

Smartphone-owning teens are also substantially more likely than other teens to have used a tablet computer to go online in the last 30 days; 30% of smartphone users have used tablets to go online in the past month, while 13% of regular phone users and 9% of those without cell phones have done the same.4

Smartphone owners are also a hair less likely than teens with other types of cell phones to have used the internet on a desktop computer in the last 30 days, with 93% of regular phone owners using a desktop or laptop, along with 85% of smartphone-owning teens.

There are no differences by phone ownership in internet use on a game console or on an mp3 player.

4 Note: This study did not collect data on how many teens own tablets, only whether or not they have used them to go online. Teens who have used them to go online could have used them in school, after-school or home settings.

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