Black teens time 54

Kelly Wallace is CNN's digital correspondent and editor-at-large covering family, career and life. CNN You probably won't be surprised to hear that a new report found that teens and tweens spend a lot of time watching TV, videos and movies, playing video games, reading, listening to music and checking social media, but you might be somewhat shocked I was! Chat with us in Facebook Messenger. Find out what's happening in the world as it unfolds. More Videos

Teens have many different kinds of friends. There are casual acquaintances, associates, classmates, school friends, friends from camp or church or dance or soccer, all with varying and shifting degrees of closeness. In contrast to the analysis in Chapter 1, this portion of the survey involved questions that asked teens to focus on all of the ways in which they spend time and interact with the friend who is closest to them. In order to gain a broad understanding of the places — including online places — teens spend time with their closest friends, the survey presented nine different venues, activities or locations and asked teens to indicate whether they regularly spend time with their closest friend at each of these venues or activities. Overall, school is by far the top location where teens say they spend time with their closest friends. The percentage of teens who spend time with their closest friend at school is largely consistent across a wide range of demographic groups. Similarly, black teens are more likely than their white and Hispanic counterparts to hang out in a neighborhood.

The mobile phone has become the favored communication hub for the majority of American teens. Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between teens and their friends, and cell calling is a close second. Those phones have become indispensable tools in teen communication patterns. Among all teens, their frequency of use of texting has now overtaken the frequency of every other common form of interaction with their friends see chart below. Fully two-thirds of teen texters say they are more likely to use their cell phones to text their friends than talk to them to them by cell phone.

Summary of Findings. A new nationally representative survey of American teenagers shows that nearly all teens age 94 percent use social media platforms. This study by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research points to Snapchat, a multifaceted application for sharing short-lived images and video narratives as well as engaging with news, and Instagram, a photo and video sharing application, as the most popular social media platforms among teens. Building on historically greater uptake of smartphones, black teens are more likely to use certain social media platforms—especially those designed and optimized for mobile use—and to use Instagram and Snapchat more frequently than white teens. Just 22 percent of white teens say they use Snapchat that frequently; for Instagram, it is 19 percent.