More Musings

Social Networking Websites and Teens

Pew Internet and American Life Project released their report Social Networking Websites and Teens: An Overview today. This report is based on an US national telephone survey of 935 youths ages 12 to 17.

Among the Key findings:

• 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
• 66% of teens who have created a profile say that their profile is not visible to all internet users. They limit access to their profiles.
• 48% of teens visit social networking websites daily or more often; 26% visit once a day, 22% visit several times a day.
• Older girls ages 15-17 are more likely to have used social networking sites and created online profiles; 70% of older girls have used an online social network compared with 54% of older boys, and 70% of older girls have created an online profile, while only 57% of older boys have done so.

Teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships.

• 91% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to stay in touch with friends they see frequently, while 82% use the sites to stay in touch with friends they rarely see in person.
• 72% of all social networking teens use the sites to make plans with friends; 49% use the sites to make new friends.
• Older boys who use social networking sites (ages 15-17) are more likely than girls of the same age to say that they use social networking sites to make new friends (60% vs. 46%).
• Just 17% of all social networking teens say they use the sites to flirt.
• Older boys who use social networking sites are more than twice as likely as older girls to say they use the sites to flirt; 29% report this compared with just 13% of older girls.

Fred Stutzman’s reaction is:

In my opinion, the key datapoint presented in this study is employment of private (friends-only or otherwise restricted) profiles by teens in social network sites. In the study, it is reported that 77% of teens have a profile available online, but 59% of teens restrict these profiles to their friends. This means that only 3 out of 10 teens have a profile that is “open” to be viewed online[1], affirming a recent report out of UW-Eau Claire that teens are effectively employing privacy strategies online.

If I had to come up with a 10,000 foot overview of this report, it would be “young people are using social networks all the time, for everything.”

Danah Boyd points out that

it’s important to know something about PEW’s methods. PEW calls families; they first speak with the parent and then talk to the teen. It is likely that the parents are nearby when their child is answering PEW’s questions. Parents influence teens answers (as i’ve seen continuously) and in the case of MySpace, teens are more likely to say ‘no’ when the truth is yes than to say ‘yes’ when the truth is no. I’ve also been regularly surprised at how many teens tell me that they don’t use these sites and then, when i poke at them, i find out that they do indeed have profiles (often created by friends) and that they login semi-regularly. Still, i suspect that PEW’s numbers are low by 10% at most.