Text or Talk? What People Choose When Using a Cell Phone

It has been an integral part of our social life for more than 50 years, but it seems the phone call is falling out of favour as texting, chatting and social networking are growing more popular.

In a survey, held from 2/10/14 to 7/9/14, Meetville.com (dating app to find the right person) posed the question “Do you like to talk on the phone?” Participants of the poll gave the following responses: “Yes” - 59%, “No” - 41%.

Out of 98,837 participants the majority was from the USA - 78%, from Canada - 2%, from Britain - 5%, from Australia - 3% and from other countries - 12%.

Although phones are still present in our lives, over the past years there have been some major shifts in the way we communicate with each other. “Texts have now surpassed traditional telephone calls and meeting face to face as the most frequent way of keeping in touch,” said James Thickett,  director of research at Ofcom(communications regulator in the UK). That means that the telephone call is now a dying institution.

It is interesting that women who don’t like to talk on the phone, seriously outnumber men: females who voted “No” - 61%, males - 39%.

Alex Cusper, Meetville service analyst, comments on the results: “the fact that women are more chatty on the phone is just a myth; both sexes just have different ideas about phone ethics. Women like talking about a lot of things, but men usually like talking about what’s relevant to them. Men in general, are not really into using phones for a long duration. Men like answering a lot of short calls more often.It makes them feel a lot more important and busy.”

Meetville, a leading mobile dating service, regularly conducts research among its users. Millions of people from the U.S., Canada, Britain and Australia answer hundreds of questions every month. You can find the results of the poll here. If you are interested in research on a particular topic, please contact us. Any reprint of the material should be followed by clickable links to the survey.