Switzerland's young people chatting day and night

February 7, 2012 / Marco D'Alessandro

The SWITCH Junior Web Barometer survey looks into the behaviour of children and young people in the Internet. As the latest survey shows: the older those questioned, the more time they spend chatting.

All those included in the survey are former participants in the Junior Web Award who created a homepage of their own for the award. Since 2009, this anonymous annual survey has focused on the pupils' assessment of themselves: How do they rate their Internet know-how, and that of their parents and teachers? What do they use the Internet for, and how often? Have they got their Internet consumption under control? And which social media platforms are they active in? A total of 274 pupils answered this time round.

At 84 percent, the absolute majority of 13 to 20-year-olds questioned use the Internet for chatting, closely followed by downloading music (78 percent). Sending e-mails and fostering contacts, however, also feature high up on the list. Not quite as many, but still more than half (51 percent) of the youngest pupils in the survey answered that they spent most of their time in the Internet chatting. Online games are even more popular in this group, however, with 53 percent of the youngest respondents specifying this as their main Internet activity. And, for all that, doing their homework in the Internet still ranks in position 3 in this group – and hence considerably higher up than for the older pupils.

Seventy-three percent of the 17 to 20-year-olds questioned, 64 percent of the 13 to 16-year-olds and 23 percent of the youngest group surf at least once a day. How and where they do this differs greatly: on their own computer, at school, or on their parents', siblings or friends' computers.

The study also showed that it is virtually impossible to control which websites the young people consume: 95 percent of the 17 to 20-year-olds and 81 percent of the 13 to 16-year-olds have full access to a computer and the contents of the web. And what merits particular thought is that almost a third of the six to twelve-year-olds similarly have uncontrolled access to websites.

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