Summary

• 37% of internet users ages 12-17 participate in video chats with others using applications such as Skype, Googletalk or iChat. Girls are more likely than boys to have such chats.
• 27% of internet-using teens 12-17 record and upload video to the internet. One major difference between now and 2006 is that online girls are just as likely these days to upload video as online boys.
• 13% of internet-using teens stream video live to the internet for other people to watch.
• Social media users are much more likely than those who do not use social media to engage in all three video behaviors studied.

Some 95% of teens 12-17 use the internet, according to a survey of 799 teens conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project between April 19 and July 14, 2011. In that study, the teens were asked about a number of online behaviors and the results for video-oriented activities are reported here.

Video chatting

37% of online teens have video chat conversations with others.

Nearly 2 in 5 online teens (37%) say they have video chatted with someone else using applications such as Skype, iChat or Googletalk.

Girls are more likely than boys to video chat.

Online girls are more likely to report video chatting than boys, with 42% of girls who use the internet saying they have video chatted compared with about a third (33%) of boys.

Teenagers of different ages are equally likely to video chat. 

Some 34% of online 12-13 year olds use video chat, as do 39% of 14-17 year olds. The differences by age are not statistically significant.

White youth are more likely to video chat than Latino youth.

White teens who use the internet are more likely to report video chatting than online Latino teens; 41% of white teens do so, as do 28% of Latino youth. There are no statistically significant differences between online black youth and either white or Latino youth in video chatting.

Youth from higher income and higher education families are more likely to video chat than youth from lower income and education households.

Online teens from families with the lowest levels of parental education – where a parent has not received a high school diploma – are much less likely than others to video chat with just 14% of teens in those families video chatting, compared with 40% of teens with parents with higher levels of education.

In a similar vein, teen internet users from higher income families are more likely to video chat than lower income teens. Of online teens from families earning $75,000 or more annually, 46% use video chat, while 32% of online teens from families earning under $50,000 annually use these services.

Frequent internet users, texters and social media users are all more likely to video chat than others.

Some 43% of daily internet users video chat, compared with 31% of weekly users and 1% of those who use the internet less often.

Our survey found that 77% of all teens ages 12-17 have cell phones and 97% of cell users (or 75% of all teens) can send and receive texts. Teens who text are also more likely to use video chatting, with 40% of texting teens chatting compared with 27% of non-texters. Other social media communicators also show similar patterns.

Some 77% of all teens–or 80% of the internet-using teens–say they use social networking sites such as Facebook; 16% of online teens use Twitter. Teens who use Facebook and Twitter are more likely to use video chat, with 41% of Facebook users chatting (compared with 25% of non-users) and 60% of Twitter users using video chat (compared with 33% of non-Twitter users.)

Recording and uploading video

27% of teen internet users record and upload video to the internet; older teens are more likely to record and upload videos.

Among teen internet users 12-17, just over one quarter (27%) say they record and upload video to the web, up from 14% of teens who had done so in 2006.¹ Among adults, 14% have uploaded videos.²

In our most recent data collection, older teens 14-17 are more likely to record and upload video than their younger counter parts, with 30% of online older teens saying they record and share videos, compared with 21% of 12-13 year olds.

In a change since 2006, boys and girls are equally likely to record and upload videos.

Nearly equal shares of online boys (28%) and girls (26%) say they shoot and share video. In 2006, online boys were nearly twice as likely as online girls to report uploading video they had taken, with 19% of boys and 10% of girls reporting the activity.

Social media using teens are more likely to shoot and share video.

Social network site users – who make up 80% of internet using teens – are more likely to record and upload video than teens who do not use social media. Broadly, 31% of social network site users record and upload videos, compared with 10% of teens who do not use social networks. Similarly, one third (33%) of Facebook users take and share video, compared with 11% of teens who do not use Facebook.

Overall, 16% of teens use Twitter. Of them, 46% record and upload video, compared with 24% of teens who do not use Twitter.

Those teens who use social network sites more frequently are also more likely to take and share video – 37% of daily social media users take and post videos, as do 24% of weekly social network users, and 17% of those who visit social sites less often than weekly.

The data also suggest that cell phone ownership (and smartphone ownership) does not relate to teens’ likelihood of recording or uploading videos. Some 77% of teens own cell phones and 23% own smartphones. In all, 28% of teen cell phone owners record and upload video, while 25% of teens without cell phones say the same.³

There are no differences in recording and uploading video by race, ethnicity or socio-economic status.

Streaming video

13% of online teens stream video live to the internet for others to watch. Home broadband users are more likely to stream video live than dial-up users.

Fewer teens stream live video to the internet for others to watch than engage in simple uploading – just 13% of teen internet users say they stream video live online.  There are few demographic differences in video streaming.  Boys and girls (13% of boys and 12% of girls) are equally likely to do it, as are younger and older teens.  Frequent internet users – those who go online daily – are more likely to stream video than those who go online weekly (16% of daily users, compared with 7% of weekly users). Teens with home broadband connectivity are also more likely to stream video live for others to view.  While 14% of broadband users stream, just 3% of those with dial-up connectivity do so.

Social media users are more likely to stream video than others.

As with other video sharing activities, social media users are more likely to report streaming video. Some 14% of teens who use social network sites stream video, compared with 5% of teen internet users who are not social network users. Similarly, 15% of Facebook users say they stream video, compared with 6% of teens who do not use Facebook. And once again, Twitter users are the most likely to report streaming video, with one-quarter of users of the service reporting streaming, compared with 10% of teens who do not use Twitter.  Frequency of social network use also plays a role; 17% of daily social media users stream, compared with 5% of teens who use social media less than weekly.

Other choices that teens make about their online privacy do not relate to their likelihood of streaming video.

The private or public nature of a teen’s social media profile does not make a difference in their likelihood of streaming video – there is no statistically significant difference among teens with private, semi-private or public profiles.

About this study

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.⁴

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. 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.⁵

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.

For more detail on the weighting and sample effects for this survey, please see the methodology section for our Teens, Kindness and Cruelty on Social Network Sites report  https://alpha.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet/Reports/2011/Teens-and-social-media.aspx.

Response Rate

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:⁶

• Contact rate – the proportion of working numbers where a request for interview was made⁷
• 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

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

Survey Questions

The survey questions that were analyzed for this report can be viewed and/or downloaded here. For the full questionnaire, please visit https://alpha.pewresearch.org/pewresearch-org/internet/Shared-Content/Data-Sets/2011/July-2011-Teens-and-Online-Behavior.aspx.