Is Snapchat only used for sexting? We asked 5,000 people to find out
survata.com
survata.com
Good point. We had the same thought and did consider running a survey variant with the fixed 6 mo time frame. And we may just give it a try to see how the results are affected.
Even with the current wording, I find the SMS comparison useful. It demonstrates that people are willing to admit to sexting in the anonymous Survata survey format. I like your hypothesis about greater willingness to admit to "bad behavior" in the distant past than in the recent past. My intuition is that anonymity weakens that effect, but we'll have to measure to know for certain.
If you look at this report on the validity of self-reported drug use, it goes into the issue of how people are more likely to admit bad behavior that happened long ago. Anonymity probably does ameliorate the problem, but I'm guessing that it would still be significant.
http://archives.drugabuse.gov/pdf/monographs/monograph167/do...
Not sure how big a role this might actually play in the results.
For example, instead of asking kids "do you smoke pot?" you ask that of 80% of people and the other 20% get "do you own a dog?"; the surveyor has no idea which question was asked but knows the overall population of dog owners.
Does this technique have a name that you know of and did you consider it?
However, I can't remember the name of it, nor the article I read about it, and Google isn't helping.
Obviously, this would only be helpful if you don't have a good idea of how many people would lie in the first place. It also depends on the assumption that people won't lie given this plausible deniability.
The biggest problem I see is that this could only increase the variance of your survey results. The way I see it you have three binomial distributions base on three random variables:
1. The number of people who would answer yes to the survey question if they were honest.
2. The number of people who lied. (This is clearly not independent to the first random variable)
3. The number of people who flipped heads. (This clearly is independent)
I still really like this method since the increased variance is a moot point if giving people plausible deniability is the best way to normalize for lying. And you can always increase your confidence in the resulting proportion by increasing your sample size.
It would be interesting to run anonymized and non-anonymized surveys with the coin flip and without to try to determine how much anonymization reduces lying on various survey questions.
One nitpick: You should subtract 50% from the yes count and then multiply by two. So in your example, you would expect that 20% of those surveyed truly sexted or use drugs.
The only halfway plausible explanation is that the 3.4% of men who are gay or bi all sext with each other. In other words, a large number of the respondents lied and the data is invalid.
That said, anecdotal evidence (the people I talk do every day) strongly indicates that people are in fact occasionally using Snapchat for other things than sexting
I see a few possible explanations: (1) A woman who sexts could have multiple sexting partners. In the extreme, you could have every man in the world sext with one woman, making the male sexting prevalence 100% and the female near 0. (2) While we defined sexting as "sending or receiving", some respondents may interpret the question as primarily about sending. There could be a gender bias in the sending vs receiving of sexts. (3) As you point out, the data is reported behavior and not observed behavior. Reported behavior often is a good proxy for observed behavior, but it is not perfect. And there are known to be effects where certain demographics answer questions dishonestly for conscious or unconscious reasons. Perhaps women are less willing to admit to sexting behavior.
Even assuming all of the participants are being truthful, you'll have some problems with definitions not being shared by the participants. The classic example is "Does oral sex count?" Men, for whom a large number of partners is (sometimes) culturally good, may be inclined to count it. Women, for whom a large number of partners is (sometimes) culturally bad, might not count it.
With respect to sexting, imagine a woman sends a man a picture of herself in a low-cut dress. The man might say, "she was totally sexting me", and believe it, the woman might say, "I was fully dressed in an outfit seen by hundreds of people at a party, how can that be sexting?", and believe it.
How would you be able to tell?
I don't mean to be a grumpy old man, but this seems even more pointless than usual. If it's not being used for sexual photos, then it's surely a fad that's going to die in a few months.
All that other crap can be done via normal messaging; there's precious little reason to use Snapchat except that it's (briefly, for now) the popular new thing.
Similarly, Snapchat encourages a certain kind of conversation, due to the disappearing photos, and ability to draw on them.
There's a lot of stuff -- really dirty/nasty jokes, really ugly faces, and I'm sure you can use your imagination -- that you would bring up in personal conversation but not really want to have an SMS or email recording of. Hell, I worked in an office where a particularly nasty-minded (in the most entertaining way) coworker of mine would send/forward me e-mails of all sorts, then come over and make sure I would delete them afterward.
Sexting is just a very small portion of all the kinds of messages people don't really want saved.
To disagree with mmakunas, I don't think people care about the privacy angle so much- I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that gives you. It's like an anti-Instagram- no filters and perfectly positioned shots, just point, shoot, send.
I'm not sure what the exactly psychology of it is or whether it even matters that the photos disappear but a lot of teens use Snapchat. Just take a look at the demographics of a Twitter search:
https://twitter.com/search?q=snapchat%20me&src=typd
Even if Snapchat doesn't do anything that normal messaging can't, they've clearly packaged it in such a way that it's tremendously popular. After all, if it was possible with normal messaging, why wasn't anyone doing it until Snapchat came about?
I think it's about creating something entirely disposable, and the freedom that
Part of that freedom comes from the level of privacy I think. But from looking at those tweets maybe I'm over estimating how people are explicitly thinking about privacy.
It just goes to show that is not always about creating something where the individual bits of functionality are new. Sometime the most compelling thing is putting a novel spin on what we already do and building a network of users around that.
Maybe it doesn't make a lot of sense to use Snapchat just for sending goofy pictures, but that doesn't mean it can't become popular for just that.
This doesn't necessarily mean that sexting is the only legitimate use case, or even the predominant use case. Rather, I see as the use case pretty much anything that people want to share via SMS, or even on Facebook -- but don't want to remain up for long, or be seen accidentally by undesired audiences (parents, co-workers, friends who are outside the specific loop, etc.).
Snapchat is sort of like social networking as pointcasting, rather than social networking as broadcasting.
This is where Snapchat does extremely well. It makes the act of sending a picture or video as frictionless as possible. I've never sent a video through MMS, but I've probably sent over 200 Snapchat videos.
It's not like sending an MMS with video or pictures is hard, it just isn't as dead simple as using Snapchat.
Another thing people like to harp on is the fact that people can take screenshots, thus "defeating the purpose." Fair point, but I think people who say this haven't really used Snapchat and don't really get why it is so sticky.
Sure, one of my friends may screenshot a silly face pic I send, but that's happened maybe 10 times out of the 4k+ snaps I've sent. The fact is I know I am not leaving a huge digital trail compared to using SMS/MMS, FB, GroupMe, etc.
Even if the system isn't perfect, it is good enough for me to trust. And the whole interaction model encourages me to send more pics and videos than I would send to my friends before I used Snapchat. It's almost replaced text messaging for me. Why send a text to my friend that I'm hungover, when I can send an image or video with my tired looking face and overlay text and drawings. It's so much more expressive and interesting than a text.
Another reason I like Snapchat is that I don't keep in touch via SMS with a lot of my friends. I may text them only once a week or every couple of weeks, but with Snapchat, I may send them a pic of something funny a couple times a week. Snapchat has made sending pictures and videos as frictionless as possible, and has changed how I communicate with people (I'm serious here).
Thanks for your comment. We're constantly testing the accuracy of our network, and building technology to screen out respondents who are lying to us. To date, the results are good. For example, when we ask respondents "Which time zone are you in?" or "Who is the president of the United State" we see around 97% accuracy. We see this as evidence of quality data.
And its HN discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5027306
I performed a few Google searches on Snapchat. I was very surprised to see the fanaticism around it being used by young people for Sexting alone. The above article paints a much different picture.
Personally i don't trust their stats, it's lower than the average for text messages, which really does not make any sense to me.
More interesting would be if they answered, "yes"
And come on, just asking them? Go ask the guys in the head shop what kind of pipes they are selling. Tobacco pipes of course. But we didn't just fall off the turnip truck.
Basically the point of Snapshot is to share mundane photos without the other person being able to share with their friends all the boring photos you send them throughout the day.
What people (read: the media) really want to know is "are teens sexting with Snapchat?" Naturally, it's harder to get survey results for that demographic.