(keitai-l) Re: 90% of UK children have mobile phones

Robb Satterwhite wrote:
> Here's an article that appeared without comment in both WAPNews and 
> EuropeMedia, and on the imode_group mailing list.
<snip>

Let's track this story down to the real source, shall we?

The WAP Group's article, dated 4th July, cites Europmedia (sic) as its
source.  The Europemedia article, dated 29th June, in turn cites Media
Guardian as its source.  A search in the Guardian archive for articles
on 'mobile phone and children' in June reveals an article
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4212672,00.html>
which comes from the Press Association and which states that the
survey was carried out by the Pupil Research Initiative of the Centre
for Science Education at Sheffield Hallam University.  The WAP Group
seems to be following Slashdot's lead in fourth-hand news.  I don't
rate Europemedia a whole lot higher.

I tracked the Pupil Research Initiative down at
<http://www.shu.ac.uk/pri/home/index.htm>.  I couldn't find the
report there, but wonder if it it's based on the survey included in
their publication 'Ideas and Evidence' for 14-16 year-olds:
<http://www.shu.ac.uk/pri/resources/ideas_evidence/body.htm>.

In that case, maybe the 90% figure is the proportion of children that
report ever using mobile phones.  (The survey certainly doesn't ask
about *ownership* of phones.)  Further, the children surveyed will be
the classmates of the researchers.  So the headline should perhaps
have been '90% of 14-16 year-olds have used a mobile phone'.  But
that wouldn't be such a good story, would it?

-- 
The opinions expressed above are my own and are not necessarily those
of my employer.

[ Did you check the archives?   http://www.appelsiini.net/keitai-l/ ]