• November 9, 2003

New academic research released last week finds Americans spend more time daily with media than they realize and that about 25% of that time is spent using two or more mediums at the same time. The study, from a team of Ball State University researchers, surveyed 101 residents of Muncie, Indiana, and found they averaged 10.5 hours of media per day, 4.5 hours of which was spent with TV, followed by computers (2.4 hours), radio (1.9 hours, reading matter (1.0 hour), recorded music (55 minutes), telephone (53 minutes) video games (12 minutes) and conventional mail (seven minutes). The academics, who directly observed each respondent for an entire day, challenged that the research was more accurate and representative of actual media usage patterns than the methods employed by syndicated media researchers.