Use of file-sharing by Canadian youth, aged 9-17
File-sharing is a popular activity for teens and tweens:
- 57 per cent of kids say that playing and downloading music is what they like to do most on the Internet.
- However, only 6 per cent of parents are aware that their kids download music.
- Six in ten secondary students have downloaded MP3s (digital music files), and 30 per cent have downloaded movies.
Gender differences
Girls and boys differ in their approach to the Internet, and to downloading files from it:
- Boys are most likely to have downloaded files.
- Among 9-to-10-year-old boys, the fourth most popular online activity is visiting sites where they can download free software or games, or exchange music files.
- But for 9-to-10-year-old girls, these activities rank only as the eleventh most popular online activity.
- Boys aged 11-12 are twice as likely as girls to look for "freebies" at Web sites such as napster.com and shockwave.com.
- By the time kids are 13-14 years old, though, both sexes are equally keen on downloading software, games and music from the Internet - those are the fourth most common online activities for both boys and girls.
- In the 15-17-year-old age range, boys download from the Internet twice as often as girls. They will also visit Web sites for a wide variety of needs, including those featuring pirated versions of popular games and software.
Sources:
Young Canadians in a Wired World: The Students' View 2001 is a nationwide investigation of Internet use among Canadian youth that explores what kids do online, how they perceive the Internet, and what they know about it.
Canada's Children in a Wired World: The Parents' View 2000 is a nationwide survey of more than 1,000 Canadian parents, who were asked about their perceptions of the Internet and their awareness of the benefits and risks it offers their children. Selected findings from the parent survey are compared to data from the student survey.
