Compulsive texting is like any other addiction and symptoms include feeling the need to interact constantly with your phone, skipping schoolwork and chores in favor of texting, and losing sleep over these digital messages. Compulsively texting is more complex. Boys also dont seem to have compulsive texting affect their school work.
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“Compulsivity is more than just the number of texts teens are engaging in”.
“It would be helpful for parents to look for signs of whether texting seems stressful for their teens, particularly if they have difficulty cutting back their texting or seem anxious when they are unable to text”, Lister-Landman said. Do they feel compelled to look at i at all times, rather than jus answering texts they get?
A study in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture said it followed more than 400 eighth and 11th graders from the same school district.
It is suspected that the reasons boys and girls text is a major factor in the findings of the study.
Teenagers, like compulsive gamblers, experience the inability to cut back, sleep loss and lying to cover up habits, the study found. Teenage girls said they had poorer grades at school as a result of texting, although this part of the research was only self-reported.
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Compulsive texters or not, girls academically outperformed boys overall in the study. A 2014 study found that the more time black and Hispanic teenagers spent on Facebook, the lower their math scores were. Even though the boys and the girls have daily texting rates that are nearly equal, the research found that the girls were 20% more compulsive about it. An experiment with college students showed that students who abstained from texting during a lecture retained more information and scored higher on a quiz. Because of this, the study says, girl’s grades in school tend to suffer and decline. The researchers have evenly divided students as per the gender, about their academic performance.
