This afternoon, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released data from their recent survey of teen Social Networks use. Needless to say, the data is very interesting, and offers data affirming some of the themes we’re seeing in recent SNS research. danah has blogged her reaction to the data, and I’m sure this report will echo substantially through our corner of the blogosphere.
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.
Beyond this interesting privacy statistic, a number of other trends emerge. In my social network predictions last week, I was called out a few times for saying that most people can oly effectively maintain one or two profiles. The data from Pew clearly validates this (and no, I hadn’t seen Pew’s data when I wrote my predictions). The Pew report states:
Fully 85% of teens who have created an online profile say the profile they use or update most often is on MySpace, while 7% update a profile on Facebook. Another 1% tend to a primary profile on Xanga. Smaller numbers told us they have profiles at places like Yahoo, Piczo, Gaiaonline and Tagged.com.
Also interesting is how young people use social networks. As reported in much of the qualitative and survey-based SNS research, the grooming of friendships is a key motivator for SNS use. According the the report, the sites are heavily used for low-intensity friendship connections – they present an easy and efficient way to keep in touch with friends new and old, from far and near. Additionally, teens are motivated to update their sites frequently, with the study reporting that “a social network profile is more engaging if it changes frequently.”
The Pew report also reflects how modes of communication and access are changing with social network adoption. Friend-to-friend contact is now occuring via SNS public and private messages (already been said many times before, but young people don’t email). Additionally, students change their behavior based on access context – i.e. school users vs. those who can access SNS at home.
The report includes some valuable summary statistics, including the following I found interesting:
- 55% of online teens have created a personal profile online, and 55% have used social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
- 37% of 12 and 13 year olds have SNS profiles.
- Seven out of ten (70%) online girls 15-17 have created a profile, compared with 57% of older boys.
- Almost half of social network-using teens visit the sites either once a day (26%) or several times a day (22%).
Among many things, this report reinforces the ubiquity of social networks. 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.” At the same time, there are a number of interesting between-gender effects in the statistics. As it becomes clear that females and males use SNS differently, what does this mean for researchers and those developing commercial applications? All in all, it is a very interesting report, kudos to Amanda Lenhart and Mary Madden for their good work. You can pick it up free at the Pew site.
[1] 77% of teens report having a publicly viewable profile, 40% of which say it is viewable by all persons. This leaves 30.8% of the total with true publicly viewable profiles.
Tags: pew, privacy, social networks, statistics, study
Fred Stutzman is a doctoral student, researcher and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science. He studies how people use social media.
