Checking The Pulse: How Tweens Spent This Summer
Posted by meredith on 07-20-2009
Today we bring you the latest installment of “Checking the Pulse,” our occasional feature with the folks at Pangea, an online advertising company that operates a network of quiz sites, including youth-oriented Quibblo.com. The surveys are developed by us and distributed to Pangea’s network of self-selecting tweens and early teens (ages 8 to 15). We hope this will help Ypulse readers (not to mention us) get a glimpse into what teens and tweens think about the topics we discuss here…
For our latest survey we wanted to see where tweens and early teens were spending their time and money this summer and heard back from 1,344 of them in the past two weeks. Here are some of the highlights…
Slow summer or…? We asked our tween quiz takers to “check all that apply” on a list of summertime activities. Only to find a surprisingly high admission of, well, inactivity. In fact, the “Nothing”option (19.2%) beat out both “Camp” (13.6%) and “Summer Job” (9.8%), and only narrowly came in behind “Travel” (21%8). Our best guess? Nothing covers a lot of ground (the other top response was the similarly vague “Other” at 29.8%) and could apply just as easily to day trips or year-long extracurricular activities such as sitting around the pool or playing video games. Still, the lack of a definitive summer game plan in favor of “nothing” or lots of mini-somethings was an interesting discovery.
With great allowance comes great responsibility More than half the tweens surveyed responded they were not currently receiving an allowance (57%). Not an entirely surprising split given that those on the younger end of the spectrum may not do too much spending without parental supervision. As for those who did get a discretionary fund, 15% reported an amount that fell in the $10-20 per week range, 11% reported $5-10 and a lucky %11 reported more than $20.
Season of spending When the tweens we surveyed did have money for summertime fun, 23% said most of it went towards group activities like amusement/water parks, concerts and movies. Followed closely by the similarly social purchase of clothes/shoes at 22% (accessories and cosmetics made a much smaller dent at 2% and 3% respectively) Traditional entertainment trailed with books (yay) 14% and music 12%. Not that these percentages reflect the proportion of time spent on these activities so much as the heavy price tag of a single concerts or trip to the amusement park.
Save & splurge While 71% of the tweens we surveyed planned to save money this summer, only 42% had a designated item they were saving up to spend on. What was deemed most splurge-worthy? Comments leaned towards tech toys (iPod, iPhone laptop, Xbox, digital camera, etc) and tween-friendly musical acts (Jonas Brothers, Taylor Swift).
For more coverage of the tween space, check out the Ypulse Tweens Channel, sponsored by the Tween Tribune.
Categorized under: Tweens