Conclusion

I found that those were in the college age and the adult age groups use text messaging to talk to their friends on a daily basis while the older age group had similar numbers for using text messaging to talk their friends on a daily and weekly basis. For the older group, they also had more people who only texted their friends on a monthly basis or even less often/never. The two other age groups had very few people in the monthly and less often/never categories for texting their friends. This data is important because it shows that the older participants actually do text and on a daily basis. We cannot assume that people who are older do not use cell phones or text messaging technology because they did not have it for most of their lives. My dad texts and so do my grandparents, but this is not the same for all people who are their age. This data shows that people who are older can adopt technology and use it to their advantage. My grandparents bought smartphones years before my parents and I switched to smartphones. We were a little late to the game, but they were early adopters. Even though they grew up using other technology to communicate with their friends, it is clear from the data that they see the advantages of using texting to talk to their friends. It is a quick and easy way to communicate and to just say hello without having to pick up the phone and call the person.

In his study, “Should We Be Concerned that the Elderly Don’t Text?” Ling discusses how the elderly do not text. I disagree with this based on what I found in my study. I found that people who are older do text and some text on a daily basis. They take advantage of this technology. To look at this more, another study should focus on the group that is older than 65. In my study, there were not enough people who were over 65 to have their own group. I had to group them in with the 50-64 year olds. Further studies should look at how often people call their friends and not just text messaging to see if that is why they are not texting their friends on a daily basis. I would focus on the older participants because they were the ones who were testing their friends every day and they had the most variety when it came to how often they were texting.

There were some problems with the topic that I focused on because of the number of participants in the study. There were not enough people in my adult group to be able to fully draw conclusions from their data. If I were to do this study again, I would try to get at least 30 participants per group. There were a lot of participants in the 18-22 group and the 50-64, 65+ groups and then very few in the 23-29, 30-49 group. There was a large percentage drop in daily texting between the adult group and the older group and I would like to see where exactly that drop occurs with more specific age group and more participants in each section.