Overview

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).

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 13-year-olds, of whom less than 1% report using a location-based service.

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 www.ciconline.org.

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, Telefónica, TELMEX, USTelecom, The Wireless Foundation, Verizon and Yahoo!. For more information, visit www.fosi.org.

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

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.  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).

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 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.

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.

Parents of teen smartphone owners are no more or less likely than other parents to use parental controls to manage their child’s mobile use and mobile internet use.

As cell phones increasingly have the capability to connect to the internet, mobile phone providers have begun to offer parental controls to allow parents to manage or constrain their child’s mobile phone use. Among all parents of teen cell phone users, 34% report using parental controls to help them manage their child’s use of his or her cell phone. Just over a quarter (28%) of the parents of smartphone owning-teens say they have enabled parental controls on their child’s phone, while 37% of parents with teens with regular mobile phones use parental controls.  The difference in parental control use between smartphone parents and regular phone parents is not statistically significant.

What do teens do with their phones?

A majority of teens exchange texts daily with others, and half exchange texts daily specifically with their friends.

Fully 63% of all teens say they exchange text messages every day with people in their lives. Just 1% of teens say they text less than once a week, and 26% of respondents (including those without cell phones) said they do not text with other people at all.

When specifically asked about texting with friends, 49% of teens send and receive text messages with friends every day – while 28% of all teens say they never text friends.

Overall, the number of teens who text daily with friends has remained flat over the past two years. In 2009, 54% of all teens (regardless of whether they owned a cell phone) texted with friends daily. This is a statistically insignificant difference with the 49% of all teens who text with friends every day in 2011.

Teens are still sending large numbers of texts, and daily averages are moving upward.

The typical American teen is sending and receiving a greater number of texts than they were in 2009; and teens who text the largest number of messages are texting even more messages on a typical day than they did two years ago.

The median number of texts (i.e. the midpoint user in our sample) sent on a typical day by teens ages 12-17 rose from 50 in 2009 to 60 in 2011. Much of this increase occurred among older teens 14-17, who went from a median of 60 texts a day to a median of 100 two years later. Boys also had a slightly larger increase in the median number of texts sent or received each day moving from 30 texts to 50 texts on a typical day. 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.

And while we see no growth in the median number of texts among white youth (flat at 50), black teens saw substantial increases, moving from a median of 60 to a median of 80 texts a day. Hispanic youth also send and receive very large numbers of texts with a median of 100 texts sent and received each day.⁶

Heavy, medium and light texters

We divide text message users into three camps: light messagers who send and receive somewhere from 0 to 20 messages on a typical day; medium messagers who send and receive 21-to 100 texts a day and heavy texters who send and receive more than 100 texts a day.

Heavy texters talk more frequently on their phones than lighter texters.

Heavy texters are also big talkers. Heavy texters are much more likely than those who text less often to say that they talk on their cell phone daily, with 69% of heavy texters talking daily on their cell phones, compared with 46% of medium and 43% of light texters. When it comes to speaking with friends, the difference between heavy texters and others extends to landlines as well as mobile phones. Nearly a third (30%) of heavy texters talk with friends on a landline every day, while just 8% and 10% of medium and light texters do so. Similarly, more than half (52%) of heavy texters talk daily on their cell phones with friends, while 29% of medium texters and 22% of light texters talk to friends that frequently on their cell phones.

Heavy texters are also more likely to report spending time with people in person outside of school on a daily basis than lighter texters – half (52%) of heavy texters spend time with people in person daily, while just a third (30% and 32%) of medium and light texters say the same, respectively.

Heavy and medium texters are also more likely than light texters to use an online social network site. Nine in ten (92% of heavy and 89% of medium) of these texters use these sites, compared with 68% of light texters.

Teens who text more than 20 texts a day are more likely to own a smartphone.

Heavy and medium texters are more likely to report owning a smartphone than those who text less often. Fully 2 in 5 heavy texters (41%) and a third (33%) of medium texters own a smartphone, compared with just under 1 in 5 (19%) of lighter texters. Light texters are more likely to say that they own a regular mobile phone than those who text more often, with 70% of light texters with a regular phone, compared with half of heavy and medium texters. Heavy texters and medium texters are also more likely to report going online via a mobile phone in the last 30 days than light texters – potentially related to their greater ownership of smartphones. There are no differences in the likelihood of a texter going online on a desktop or laptop, a game console or an Mp3 player by the number of texts sent and received each day.

Among texting teens who do not own a computer, heavy texters are the least likely to have any computer access at home.

Overall, teens who text have relatively equal access to computers – approximately three quarters of each group says they own a desktop or laptop computer. But when digging into the 26% of teens who say they do not own a desktop or laptop – a far greater percentage of the heavy texters in this non-owning group report that they do not have any access to any computer at home, even one owned by someone else in the household. Nearly half of the heavy texters in this computerless group do not have computer access at home at all, while just a bit more than one-fifth of medium and light texters who do not personally own a computer say they lack home computer access.

While teens still place calls, their frequency of calling friends is declining

Nearly 2 in 5 (39%) of all teens talk to people they know on a cell phone every day, though 25% of teens say they cannot or do not ever talk on a cell phone. Landlines do not show the same kind of all-purpose utility, however – just under 1 in 5 (19%) of teens say they talk to people daily on a landline phone – while a similar 20% say they never talk to someone on a landline (or cannot do so).

However, when looking more specifically at talking with friends by voice calls, we see evidence of a decline in the frequency of voice calling for these conversations with friends. Just 14% of teens say they talk daily with friends on a landline, down from a full 30% in 2009.  Nearly a third (31%) of teens say they never talk on a landline with friends (or report that they cannot do so).  Cell phone calling to friends shows a similar decline – 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.

Around 1 in 20 teens use location-based 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. The question we asked on our survey focused on cell phone-based use of location-based services, and was asked of cell phone owners. Overall, 6% of all American teens use location-based services on their cell phones. When focusing solely on cell phone users, fully 8% of teen cell users have used such a service on their cell phone to check in or share their location. Smartphone owners are more avid users – 18% of smartphone owners in the sample had shared their location, compared with 2% of all other teens.

Older teens ages 14 to 17 are more likely to use location-based services (9%) than 12 and 13-year-olds, of whom less than 1% report using a location-based service. Indeed, in our sample the largest group of teens who broadcast their location are 17-year-olds, of whom 19% reported using these services, compared with 6% of 15 and 16-year-olds.

There are no statistically significant differences in use of location-based services by gender, race, household income, or parent’s education level.  There also appears to be a relationship between sharing one’s location and sharing other information with others. Teens who use location-based services are also more likely to have ever shared a password with a friend or significant other than teens who do not use the services (11% vs. 4%).

Texting dominates teens’ general communication choices

When asked generally about how they communicate with people in their lives – not just about their friends, but about all kinds of people – teens point to text messaging as the dominant daily mode of communication. Among all teens:

• 63% say that they use text to communicate with others every day.
• 39% of teens make and receive voice calls on their mobile phones every day.
• 35% of all teens socialize with others in person outside of school on a daily basis.
• 29% of all teens exchange messages daily through social network sites.
• 22% of teens use instant messaging daily to talk to others.
• 19% of teens talk on landlines with people in their lives daily.
• 6% of teens exchange email daily.

And increasingly, teens do not have the capability or the interest in exchanging instant messages or exchanging email. Nearly 2 in 5 teens say they never or cannot exchange instant messaging, and another 39% of teens say they never exchange email. Talking on a landline is also proving less popular, with 20% of teens saying they never or cannot talk on a landline.

How communication with friends has changed over time⁷

In addition to our general questions about how teens communicate with others, we also asked specific questions about how teens communicate with friends.

As discussed earlier in this report, texting and calling with friends via a mobile phone are the two most popular modes of communication with friends for teens. Daily text messaging with friends has remained stable since 2009 and daily voice calling with friends on cell phones has declined in the past two years, from 38% of teens calling friends daily on cells in 2009 to 26% two years later. This decline in voice calling on mobiles comes after 3 years of relatively stable findings for daily calls.

The only increase seen in communicating with friends is in messaging through social networks. Nearly 3 in 10 (29%) of teens communicate with friends daily through messages on social networks sites, up modestly from the 21% who did so daily in 2006. Messaging through social networks has shown a gradual increase over the past 6 years.

Email and instant messaging both show a gradual decline in daily use since 2006, with 23% of teens using instant messaging daily with friends, down from 28% in 2006. Email is even less used on a daily basis – 8% of teens say they email daily with friends, down from 14% in 2006. More than half (54%) of all teens now say they never use email to talk with friends, and one third of teens say they never use instant messaging or send messages via social media sites.

Face-to-face communication remains an important mode of communication with friends as well, though teens may be meeting with friends face-to-face outside of school a bit less frequently than they were in the past.  While the number of teens who meet with friends face-to-face on daily basis has declined slightly to 25% from 33% in 2009, teens who say they talk with friends face-to-face outside of school several times a week has increased to 37% from 28% in 2009.

2011 Teens and Digital Citizenship Survey

Prepared by Princeton Survey Research Associates International for the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project

JULY 2011

Summary

The 2011 Teens and Digital Citizenship Survey sponsored by the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project obtained telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 799 teens ages 12 to 17 years old and their parents living in the continental United States. The survey was conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates International. The interviews were conducted in English and Spanish by Princeton Data Source, LLC from April 19 to July 14, 2011. Statistical results are weighted to correct known demographic discrepancies. The margin of sampling error for the complete set of weighted data is ±4.8 percentage points.

In addition to the two surveys, this study conducted 7 focus groups with teens between the ages of 12 and 19 in the greater Washington, DC metro area in January and February 2011. Participants were recruited via word of mouth, email, schools, and non-profit organizations. A total of 57 youth participated in the focus groups, though each group averaged 8 to 14 people. Groups were co-ed, but were broken into middle school and high school aged youth. The groups were balanced for gender and crossed the socio-economic and family structure spectrum. Black youth were over-represented. All participants were required to have access to either a computer or a cell phone to participate. Participants were paid a $40 cash incentive for their participation. Parental consent was obtained for all minor participants, as was the assent of the minor participants themselves. Eighteen and 19 year-old participants consented to their own participation.

Further details on the design, execution, and analysis of the teen and parent telephone survey are discussed below.

Design and Data Collection Procedures

Sample Design                                 

A combination of landline and cellular random digit dial (RDD) samples was used to represent all teens and their parents in the continental United States who have access to either a landline or cellular telephone. Both samples were provided by Survey Sampling International, LLC (SSI) according to PSRAI specifications.

Both samples were disproportionately stratified to increase the incidence of blacks and Latinos. The same stratification scheme was used for both sample frames and was based on the estimated incidence of minority groups at the county level. All counties in the continental United States were divided into ten strata based on the estimated proportion of African American and Latino populations. Strata with higher minority densities were oversampled relative to strata with lower densities. Phone numbers were drawn with equal probabilities within strata. The disproportionate sample design was accounted for in the weighting and does not affect the representative nature of the sample.⁸

Contact Procedures

Interviews were conducted from April 19 to July 14, 2011. As many as 7 attempts were made to contact and interview a parent at every sampled telephone number. After the parent interview, if the teen was not immediately available, an additional 7 calls were made to interview an eligible teen. Sample was released for interviewing in replicates, which are representative subsamples of the larger sample. Using replicates to control the release of sample ensures that complete call procedures are followed for the entire sample. Calls were staggered over times of day and days of the week to maximize the chance of making contact with potential respondents. Each telephone number received at least one daytime call in an attempt to complete an interview.

Contact procedures were slightly different for the landline and cell samples. For the landline sample, interviewers first determined if the household had any 12 to 17 year-old residents. Households with no teens were screened-out as ineligible. In eligible households, interviewers first conducted a short parent interview with either the father/male guardian or mother/female guardian. The short parent interview asked some basic household demographic questions as well as questions about a particular teen in the household (selected at random if more than one teen lived in the house.)

For the cell phone sample, interviews first made sure that respondents were in a safe place (for example, not driving) to talk and that they were speaking with an adult. Calls made to minors were screened-out as ineligible. If the person was not in a safe place to talk a callback was scheduled. Interviewers then asked if any 12- to 17-year-olds lived in their household. Cases where no teens lived in the household were screened-out as ineligible. If there was an age-eligible teen in the household, the interviewers asked if the person on the cell phone was a parent of the child. Those who were parents went on to complete the parent interview. Those who were not parents were screened-out as ineligible.

For both samples, after the parent interview was complete an interview was completed with the target child. Data was kept only if the child interview was completed.⁹

Interviewers were given instructions to tell parents – if asked – that they should not remain on the phone with the child during the interview, but that if they were concerned they could sit nearby. The interviewer then coded whether or not the parent remained on the phone with the child. In this survey, 90 of the 799 interviews (or 11%) had a parent listening on the phone during the child’s interview. Parents who elected to remain on the phone while their child completed the interview were more likely to be listening to the interviews of girls and children age 12 and to a lesser extent, age 13. These parents were also more likely to be white. Teens whose parents listened to their interview were less likely to use the internet, use social network sites, or go online using a mobile phone. Among those teens whose parents attended their interview who do use social network sites, they were more likely to report using Facebook than teens whose parents did not listen in. We elected to retain these interviews as a part of our larger sample – first because there were very few statistically significant differences between the responses of teens whose parents listened in, and those whose parents did not. Second, in the places where we did see modest differences, understanding what might be behind those differences was difficult to tease out – the age of the child may have been a factor, or how the parent parented that child, or the fact that the parent was listening to the interview. So rather than introduce additional bias into the data, we elected to leave the cases in the data set, and note in the text where the parent’s listening made a statistically significant difference in the responses of the teen.

Weighting and analysis

Weighting is generally used in survey analysis to compensate for patterns of nonresponse and disproportionate sample designs that might bias survey estimates. This sample was weighted in three stages. The first stage of weighting corrected for the disproportionate RDD sample designs. For each stratum the variable SAMPWT was computed as the ratio of the size of the sample frame in the stratum divided by the amount of sample ordered in the stratum.

The second stage of weighting involved correcting for different probabilities of selection based on respondents’ phone use patterns. Respondents who have both a landline and a cell phone have a greater chance of being sampled than respondents with access to only one kind of phone. To correct for this we computed a variable called PUA (Phone Use Adjustment). Respondents with one kind of phone (either landline or cell) were assigned a PUA of 0.5 while respondents with both types of phones were assigned a PUA of 1.0. SAMPWT and PUA were then multiplied together to use as an input weight (WEIGHT1) for post-stratification raking

The interviewed sample was raked to match national parameters for both parent and child demographics. The parent demographics used for weighting were: sex; age; education; race; Hispanic origin; number of 12- to 17-year-olds in household; phone use and region (U.S. Census definitions). The child demographics used for weighting were gender and age. The parameters came from a special analysis of the Census Bureau’s 2010 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) that included all households in the continental United States. The phone use parameter was derived from recent PSRAI survey data.

Raking was accomplished using Sample Balancing, a special iterative sample weighting program that simultaneously balances the distributions of all variables using a statistical technique called the Deming Algorithm. Weights were trimmed to prevent individual interviews from having too much influence on the final results. The use of these weights in statistical analysis ensures that the demographic characteristics of the sample closely approximate the demographic characteristics of the national population. Table 1 compares weighted and unweighted sample distributions to population parameters.

Effects of Sample Design on Statistical Inference

Post-data collection statistical adjustments require analysis procedures that reflect departures from simple random sampling. PSRAI calculates the effects of these design features so that an appropriate adjustment can be incorporated into tests of statistical significance when using these data. The so-called “design effect” or deff represents the loss in statistical efficiency that results from systematic non-response. The total sample design effect for this survey is 1.95.

PSRAI calculates the composite design effect for a sample of size n, with each case having a weight, w_i as:

In a wide range of situations, the adjusted standard error of a statistic should be calculated by multiplying the usual formula by the square root of the design effect (√deff ). Thus, the formula for computing the 95% confidence interval around a percentage is:

Response Rate

Table 2 reports the disposition of all sampled callback telephone numbers ever dialed. The response rate estimates the fraction of all eligible respondents in the sample that were ultimately interviewed. At PSRAI it is calculated by taking the product of three component rates:¹⁰

• Contact rate – the proportion of working numbers where a request for interview was made¹¹
• Cooperation rate – the proportion of contacted numbers where a consent for interview was at least initially obtained, versus those refused
• Completion rate – the proportion of initially cooperating and eligible interviews that agreed to the child interview and were completed

Thus the response rate for landline sample was 12 percent and the response rate for the cell sample was 7 percent.

Topline survey results

The topline for this report is available to download as a PDF here.