When working with the corpus, please be careful to differentiate between people who only participated and people who also filled in the questionnaire. Of the 2'784 people who sent in SMS, only 1'316 answered the questionnaire. When retrieving any statistical data about age, sex, etc., you do not get information about all participants, but about the people who filled in the questionnaire. These 1'316 participants, however, wrote 20'413 SMS, thus personal data is available for nearly four fifth of the corpus. There were also 96 people who filled in the questionnaire but did not send any SMS. Their information has been kept but is not currently available.
The following figures are, thus, all based on the information from 1'316 people who did fill in the questionnaire. When figures about SMS are quoted, only their SMS are considered.
For some questions, more than one option was possible as can be seen from total values higher than 100%. For most questions, there is also an option N/A, which means that people did not answer this specific question even though they did fill in all or at least some of the rest of the questionnaire. It thus has to be differentiated between a) people who did not fill in the questionnaire at all and b) people who did not answer to one specific questions. The SMS of the former are not considered when calculating the figures below, while the latter are.
| Participants | % | SMS | % | SMS pP | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Females | 847 | 64% | 13'595 | 66% | 16.1 |
| Males | 465 | 35% | 6'789 | 33% | 14.6 |
| N/A | 4 | ‹ 1% | 29 | ‹ 1% | 7.3 |
| Age | Participants | % | SMS | % | SMS pP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 – 19 | 246 | 19% | 3'506 | 7% | 14.3 |
| 20 – 29 | 603 | 46% | 8'867 | 43% | 14.7 |
| 30 – 39 | 196 | 15% | 2'858 | 14% | 14.6 |
| 40 – 49 | 149 | 11% | 2'872 | 14% | 19.3 |
| 50 – 59 | 78 | 6% | 1'437 | 7% | 18.4 |
| 60+ | 40 | 3% | 870 | 4% | 21.8 |
The oldest participant is a 77-year-old woman who sent us 55 SMS. However, she is not the busiest in her age group, there is also a 60-year-old woman who wrote 150 SMS and a 68-year-old woman with 81 SMS.
The youngest ones are three 12-year-olds. They sent in 6, 2 and 24 SMS respectively.
Some insight into the writing habits of young and old participants can be found in Ueberwasser (2013).