This is the second report by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project exploring how different generations use the internet. All the generation labels used in these reports, with the exceptions of “Younger Boomers” and “Older Boomers,” are the names conventionalized by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (Perennial, 1992). The Pew Internet Project’s “Generations” reports make the distinction between Younger Boomers and Older Boomers because enough research has been done to suggest that the two decades of Baby Boomers are different enough to merit being divided into distinct generational groups.
This year, the Pew Research Center published a series of reports that more closely examined the values, attitudes and experiences of the Millennial generation, which generally encompasses teens and Millennials. These reports are available in full at pewresearch.org/millennials. Many of these reports also compare this younger generation to older cohorts.
The primary adult data in this report come from a Pew Internet Project survey conducted from April 29 to May 30, 2010. The most current teen data in this study is from a separate Pew Internet survey of teens and their parents conducted from June 26 to September 24, 2009. For more information on these and other surveys cited in this report, including survey dates of all activities cited, please see the Methodology section at the end of this report.