Our sample consisted of 388 answers, of which 249 were qualified for analysis. There were 65 % girls and 32 % boys (the rest were missing) in these 249 cases, aged primarily between 14 and 16. Here are some basic facts of the sample:
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22% used the internet more than 20 h per week. Only 16 % used it less than 5 h a week.
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76 % (!) had created some kind of content (text, pictures, audio, video, ratings etc.) on the internet in the past two weeks. Compared to a 2005 PEW study which discovered a percentage of 57 %, we can see that we are constantly moving towards more and more UGC (although these studies are not totally comparable because of the different measures and geographic location).
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Everyone was a part of a some web-based community — 24 % were members in just one community, 22 % in two, 15 % in three, 13 % in four, 9 % in five, and 17 % in six or more. Of those who weren’t qualified only 24 didn’t have profile in any community — which is a mere 6 % of the whole!
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When asked for their most important community, an astonishing 60 % mentioned IRC Galleria, a Finnish social networking site. This is of course no news to Finns, who all are aware of the popularity of Galleria among teenagers. The interesting point here is the difference between boys and girls: 86 % of that 60 % above were girls.
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Other important communities cited ranged from Suomi24 to Facebook, from deviantART to Youtube, and from Last.fm to World of Warcraft plus a whole lot of smaller Finnish sites.
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27 % spent more than 10 h per week in their afore mentioned most important community. 31 % spent between 5 and 10 h, and 42 % less than 5 h a week.
That’s all for starters. Next up, some cross-tabulation highlights.
Tags: communities, content creation, empirical study, internet use, results, teens, thesis, UGC
