Teenage girls who compulsively text likelier to do worse academically

A new study has revealed that teenage girls, who compulsively text are associated with poorer school performance than their male counterparts.

Lead researcher Kelly M. Lister of the Delaware County Community College said that compulsive texting was more complex than frequency of texting, adding that it involved trying and failing to cut back on texting, becoming defensive when challenged about the behavior and feeling frustrated when one can't do it.

In the study, Lister and her colleagues surveyed 403 students (211 girls, 192 boys) in grades eight and 11 from schools.

They designed a 'Compulsive Texting Scale' to examine whether texting interfered with study participants' ability to complete tasks and the students also completed a questionnaire that focused on their academic performance and how well-adjusted they were in school.

Only girls showed a negative association between this type of texting and school performance, which included grades, school bonding and feeling academically competent.

Lister said that Girls in developmental stage also were more likely than boys to ruminate with others, or engage in obsessive, preoccupied thinking, across contexts, adding that it might be that the nature of the texts girls send and receive was more distracting, thus interfering with their academic adjustment.

The study is published in the journal Psychology of Popular Media Culture.