Saturday, December 19, 2009
A Gender Divide in Children's Use of Cell Phone Features
A recent study by University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) sociologist Shelia Cotten, Ph.D., finds that the way the kids will use their new phones depends on their gender.
In a study of nearly 1,000 middle-school students, students were asked to rate the different ways they use their cell phone on a five-point scale, from zero meaning "Never" to 5 meaning "Several Times a Day." The study found that boys scored higher than girls for using their cell phones to play games, share pictures and videos, listen to music and/or send e-mails, even after accounting for how much the students liked using their phones and how skilled they were at using them, says Cotten, whose study appears in the current issue of the journal New Media & Society.
Girls, on the other hand, used the phone as a phone book or contact list more often than boys did, says Cotten, who teaches in the UAB Department of Sociology and Social Work. But when UAB researchers looked at more traditional types of cell-phone use - how frequently children made calls and used text messaging - no gender differences were detected, with girls averaging 2 hours on the cell phone each day and boys averaging about 1.8 hours per day
Source: cellular-news
In a study of nearly 1,000 middle-school students, students were asked to rate the different ways they use their cell phone on a five-point scale, from zero meaning "Never" to 5 meaning "Several Times a Day." The study found that boys scored higher than girls for using their cell phones to play games, share pictures and videos, listen to music and/or send e-mails, even after accounting for how much the students liked using their phones and how skilled they were at using them, says Cotten, whose study appears in the current issue of the journal New Media & Society.
Girls, on the other hand, used the phone as a phone book or contact list more often than boys did, says Cotten, who teaches in the UAB Department of Sociology and Social Work. But when UAB researchers looked at more traditional types of cell-phone use - how frequently children made calls and used text messaging - no gender differences were detected, with girls averaging 2 hours on the cell phone each day and boys averaging about 1.8 hours per day
Source: cellular-news
# posted by Zeynep : 5:19 AM
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]
Post a Comment