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Nov 20, 2008 10:00 pm US/Central
UTD Does First Ever Teens & Text Messaging Study
NORTH TEXAS (CBS 11 / TXA 21) ―
Do you ever feel like your kids are in a secret society when they text message? Now, for the first time ever, a local researcher is cracking the code on teen texting and you might be shocked at what she found.
Lydia Boyles, 17, and her 14-year-old sister Annie love to text message. "I think I am a little bit addicted to it," Lydia says. "I could keep away from it [the cell phone] if I wanted, but I'd rather have it with me."
Like most teenagers, texting has become a major form of communication for the Arlington siblings. The Boyles say they text more than they talk on their cell phones.
For their mom, Debbie, texting is a way to keep tabs on her kids. "What I like about it is the check in and the safety component to it," Debbie says.
But the North Texas mother wonders if her daughter's constant texting is having a negative effect on their communication skills. "You can't tell what anyone means by their texts because there's no inflection," she explained. "If you can't communicate face-to-face, then there's a problem."
Dr. Marion Underwood with the University of Texas at Dallas Center for Children and Families is studying that very subject. She and her team are looking at actual text messages sent by teens.
"It seemed to me that it would be possible to give these young people handheld devices and be able to capture the content of what they did on them," Dr. Underwood said of the analysis. "I think this is really a view into the hidden world of adolescent peer culture."
The study, known as The Blackberry Project, is a new version of an earlier study called The Friendship Project, which Dr. Underwood started six years ago.
In 2003, the UTD researchers began studying how a more than 200 third-graders interacted with their peers and their families. Dr. Underwood says they wanted to learn more about how the children develop social skills and reacted in certain social situations.
As the children grew into teenagers, though, Dr. Underwood realized a lot of the kids' communication was happening online and in text messages. That's when she decided to tweak her study.
Working with Sprint and several other communications companies, Dr. Underwood armed 175 teenagers with special Blackberries that record everything they do.
"We get their text messaging, the content of their text messaging, their e-mail, and we get instant messaging conversations," says Dr. Underwood.
This is the first study of its kind that looks at actual text message content, rather than just text messaging frequency. Dr. Underwood says, though, that they were still shocked by the volume of messages they've recorded so far.
"As soon as we started seeing text messages in the archive, we realized that it was just a massive amount," she says.
According to the data, at least one teen in the study sent and received 16,000 text messages in just one month. "I think it's amazing," she said. "I don't know where they find the time."
Most of the teens studied sent and received more than 1,300 text messages each month - which averages to 43 texts a day. Dr. Underwood says the sample is evenly split, studying the same number of males and females. The females, she says, generally text more often than the males.
Out of the entire sample, though, Dr. Underwood says her team was struck by who the teens were talking to a lot of the time. "There is way more parent/child communication in what we're collecting than I ever would've expected," she says.
Teens also seem to open up more about their personal feelings over their text messages - something Dr. Underwood says could be because texting gives them a medium to talk where they feel more comfortable.
"I've seen exchanges between romantic partners that are very moving and genuine where the two young people are talking about everything they like about each other," says Dr. Underwood.
Plano psychologist, Dr. Milt Gearing, has a different take, though. He warns, by texting their feelings, teens might be missing out on learning important social skills. "You're not developing the social skills you need to develop or the social judgment or anything else," he says. "Some of these kids just hole up in their room and are just doing it not stop."
However, based on what the data collected so far, Dr. Underwood says the kids are communicating more with their families, and in a more positive manner with each other. "The whole sample is showing growth in positive behaviors and decreases in negative behaviors," she says.
The teens and their families are all aware their electronic messages are being recorded in a database. Despite that fact, Dr. Underwood says, based on the messages they've seen since beginning this part of the project this summer, the teens aren't holding anything back.
The families in the study have all been promised complete privacy and anonymity. The Boyles family interviewed for this CBS 11 News story is not associated with the study.
Dr. Underwood says they'll be collecting data from their sample group of teens for four more years, and then they'll be able to analyze the data and release their study.
(© MMIX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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