Kids From Affluent Backgrounds Video Chat Most

Looking for highly engaged, socially active teens who reside in high-income households? Video sharing and streaming platforms are a good place to start, according to new findings from the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Indeed, youth from higher-income and higher-education families are more likely to video chat than youth from lower-income and education households, Pew found.

“Just 14% of teens in lower-income families are video chatting, compared with 40% of teens with parents with higher levels of education,” according to Amanda Lenhart, a senior research specialist at Pew Internet.

Similarly, teens who use Facebook and Twitter are more likely to use video chat, with 41% of Facebook users chatting -- compared with 25% of nonusers -- and 60% of Twitter users using video chat -- compared with 33% of non-Twitter users.

Overall, 37% of Web users ages 12-to-17 reported participating in video chats with others using applications such as Skype, Googletalk or iChat, while 27% reported recording and uploading video to the Web.

Some 95% of teens 12-17 use the Internet, according to a survey of 799 teens conducted by Pew between April and July of last year.

Neither ethic background or sex had a great deal to do with video sharing and streaming behavior, Pew concluded. That represented a marked change from previous research, which found that boys were far more likely to engage in such activities.

Online girls, however, are more likely to report video chatting than boys -- with 42% of girls who use the Web saying they have video chatted, compared with about one-third (33%) of boys.

White teens who use the Internet are more likely to report video chatting than online Latino teens -- 41% of white teens do so, compared to 28% of Latino youth. However, Pew found no statistically significant differences between online black youth and either white or Latino youth in video chatting.

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