Tfno: (0034) 91 7400019
Fax: (0034) 91 7400207
ESPAÑA
E-mail: contacto@protegeles.com

También puede encontrarnos en:

Our Studies > Children's habits on internet

Children's habits on internet

This study has jointly carried out by two Spanish NGOs: ACPI (Action agains Child Pornography) and PROTEGELES under the Child Ombudsperson request.

Summary of the most relevant results

Only one out of three children using Internet mention searching for information as his or her main objective: 36% of them use Internet to chat online, 17% to play computer games online and 13% to look for and download music.
However, in order to get a deeper understanding of the situation, we must also take into consideration which is the second main reason for children to use Internet. As second choice, searching for information comes down to the third place (only 24% of children said “searching for information” is the second reason for them to connect t Internet), whilst chatting online ranks second (25%) and looking for and downloading music takes the first place (27.5%) However, playing online games comes fourth but no too far away (22.5%).
Almost half of the surveyed children (48%) connect to Internet very often or nearly every day, 26.5% use Internet several days a week and only 14.5% of them connect to Internet once a week. Finally, 11% do it even less often, two or three times a month.
Considering the number of hours that children or young people stay connected to Internet, 65.5% of youngsters use Internet less that 5 hours a week (among them, 33.5% less than 2 hours a week and the remaining 32% do it 2 to 5 hours a week). 19.% of children surfing Internet do it 5 to 10 hours a week and only 15% of them do it more than 10 hours a week.
The large majority of teenagers that use Internet quite frequently do it from their home’s computer on usual basis (84%). 11% prefer going to a cybercentre and 4% to a friend’s house. Just 2.5% of surveyed children admit using their school’s computers.
In order to have a more accurate approach to reality, it is worth considering the places they choose as an alternative to their home when for any reason they can’t or they don’t want to use their home’s computer to connect to Internet. So, as second best place to connect to Internet, children go to a friend’s house (40%), a cybercentre (25.5%) and finally, their school (15%). It is significant that 16% of teenagers always access Internet from the same computer and this percentage reaches 32.4% among primary education students.
If we bring together all these data, we can conclude that:
87.5% of children access Internet from their own house.
36% of children using Internet regularly also connect to Internet from cybercentres
44% of children use a friend’s house to access Internet
Only 18.5% of children use their school’s computers as first or second option to surf the net.
When it comes to searching useful information for their schoolwork, half of the surveyed children (49.5%) affirm finding the information they need quite easily while 42% only find it “sometimes” and 8.5% find it “on rare occasions”.
Only 40.5% of surveyed children have no problem to find web pages specifically designed for children, compared to 37.5% that find them “sometimes” and 22% that only find pages suitable for children “on rare occasions”.
28% of children visit pornographic pages: 19% do it “from time to time” and 9% do it “quite often”.
48% of surveyed children visit pages with violent content: 30% do it “from time to time” and 8% do it “quite often”
16% of children using Internet visit pages with a racist of xenophobic content: 13% do it “from time to time” and 3% do it “quite often”.
45% of children using Internet chat online several times a week: 27% do it almost everyday and 18% do it several times a week,. Among the remaining children, 17% of them participate in online chatrooms once a week and 38% even lees often: 2 to 3 times a month. Online chatting is probably the most used Internet function by children.
Among children participating in chatrooms, 56% of them do it at children chatrooms, 28% use this kind of chatroom very rarely and 17% of them never enter children chatrooms.
Around 30% of children that use Internet on regular basis, have already provided their telephone number at least once when chatting online, 17% of them assures having done so several times.
14.5% of surveyed children have set an appointment with a stranger through the Internet. 8% of them have evn done so more that once. We have observed that 10% of these children not only showed up at the meeting but they did it by themselves and that around 7% of them did not warm other people about their plans of meeting with a stranger. Among children that kept the appointment, 9% admit that the person they met was not the way they had figured it out and 2% point out that the person was an adult. 4% turned up at the meeting but nobody showed up.
54.5% of children using Internet have not received any information on basic safety rules to follow when surfing the net.
86% of children get connected to Internet from a computer that doesn’t have any filtering system installed on it.
44% of children using Internet on regular basis confess having felt sexually groomed or stalked. Among them, 11% admit having been in this kind of situation more than once.
Furthermore, 11% of children that use Internet on regular basis have been called names and insulted by other Internet users, 4% have been sent unsolicited mails with harmful content and 1.5% admit having felt afraid.
We will focused now on the most spread illegal behaviour among children users of Internet: copying materials that are under a copyright license. Most children don’t know they are committing an offence when copying into a CD music downloaded from the Internet. The ratio of children and teenagers using computer CD burning devices to do so is increasing very fast. Right now, 40% of children or young people using Internet admit searching for music on the Interne quite often. The older the child, the more frequently they use Internet to search for music.
37% of children users of Internet admit feeling “the need to connect regularly to Internet”.
23% of children connecting to Intenet admit playing online games almost every time they get connected. 17.5% play half the times they get connected, 12% do so one out of three times and 44% play just once out of four times. On the other hand, there are 3.5% of children that never play online games.

The study conclusions and other data are detailed and broken down according to age, sex and level of education.

NOTE ON THE RESULTS

We want to highlight that the ratio of Spanish children below 18 years of age that use Internet in regular basis only reaches 25% of the total, so that the results of this study only concern that 25% and not the totality of Spanish children.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STUDY

The characteristics of the study are detailed on its first pages. For its completion, four thousand 10-17 year-old children of both sexes were surveyed at their schools, cybercentres, at places where they like to meet, in the streets and through Internet pages suitable for children.