Last week I posted some statistics about adults that texted while driving. Well new numbers have come out from the LG Text Ed Survey. You can find the results by click here. Here are some of the things that stood out most from the research:
- 44 percent of parents admitted to texting and driving.
- 28 percent of parents admit to engaging in some form of “sexting”
- 42 percent of parents admit to texting someone while at the dinner table; whereas 69 percent of teens admit to texting at the dinner table.
- 45 percent of teens admit to texting and driving. And only 4 percent of parents believe their teens ever text while driving.
- 41 percent of teens admit to sending, receiving, or forwarding a text that said something sexual, while only 11 percent of parents thought their teens had ever sexted.
- 90 percent of texting parents felt closer to their teen as a result of the medium.
- 58 percent of teens said being able to text their parents made them feel closer.
- 83 percent of teens prefer their parents check in with them via text.
Source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-text-98497159.html
July 26th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
I know I’ve commented on the previous posts around this topic, and I hate to beat a point in the ground, but the lack of transparency in the way the numbers are presented in these studies makes me question the validity of the findings. For example, given the age range of the teens, only the 16-17 year olds can legally drive by themselves. If 45% of the teens (note that they didn’t clarify that this is teens who have drivers licenses), then there had to have been a larger population of teens aged 16-17 polled vs. 13-15. This skews the data tremendously.
Conversely, the study selected parents of teens that are 13-17 years old, but makes no mention that they were able to poll the parents of the teens that they polled. That being said, if the study contained a large population of parents of teens that cannot drive, it would follow that parents would respond that they don’t believe their children text while driving.
It would be great if someone conducted a true survey with transparent results that don’t appear to be trying to prove a point that may not be there.