Survey Offers Glimpse of Young Social Networkers’ Habits

By Martha Irvine

For 17-year-old Amanda Sanchez, social networking is an obsession, a distraction – and when she moved to a new town last summer, it was her lifeline.

“Over the summer, MySpace was my best friend,” says the high school junior, who lives in San Dimas, Calif. “I didn’t know anybody after I moved, so I was on there all the time.”

She usually checks her page a couple times a day – and keeps in touch with old friends and those she’s made at her new high school. So preferred is this form of communication among people her age that guys ask her for her MySpace address more often than her phone number.

It’s pretty typical behavior, according to a new survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The survey of 12- to 17-year- olds provides some of the first independent numbers on social networking for that age group – and found that older girls, in particular, are the most likely to have used social networking sites, such as MySpace or Facebook.

The popular sites are among those that allow users to create profiles, swap messages and share photos and video clips, with the goal of expanding their circle of online friends.

The Pew survey, released Sunday, found that 70 percent of teen girls, ages 15 to 17, had profiles on social networking sites, compared with 57 percent of boys in that age bracket.

The numbers remained much the same across racial and economic lines.

“Most teens realize how much of social life is happening in these networks – and that’s something they often want to be a part of,” says Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at Pew.

The survey also found that MySpace was, by far, the most popular site. Of the youth who’d used social networking, 85 percent said they used MySpace, while 7 percent had done the same on Facebook and 1 percent on Xanga.

The survey of 935 U.S. youth, ages 12 to 17, was done by telephone in October and November. The results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.7 percentage points.

When looking at the entire age bracket – 12 to 17 – Lenhart and her colleagues found that 55 percent said they used social networking sites. Not surprisingly, she said, younger children in that age range were the least likely to do so, with just over a third of 12- and 13-year-olds saying they’d created a profile. Experts say this is partly due to the fact that sites such as MySpace require users to be 14 (though they can lie about their age to gain access).

Danah Boyd, a researcher at the University of Southern California, says the survey results largely match what she’s found in the field when interviewing teens.

That includes findings that girls are most likely to use social networking as a way to maintain contact with current friends, as well as those they rarely see.

“Our brains are attuned to social data. We love gossip. We love details about one another,” Boyd says. “In the process, we build friendships.”

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