"Typical" Users Makes 5 Telephone Calls a Day

In markets where consumption of any product is highly skewed, an “average” amount of usage, measured as a “mean,” does not offer as much insight as the “median,” the figure where half of usage is heavier, and half is lighter. Consider mobile voice usage.

An mean number of calls per day is 12, while the median is five, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.


That doesn't mean "most" people make five calls a day. It means half of mobile users call less than that, while half call more.


Some 83 percent of American adults own cell phones and 73 percent send and receive text messages. The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project asked text users how they prefer to be contacted on their mobiles and 31 percent said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53 percent said they preferred a voice call to a text message. Summary of Findings

Heavy text users are much more likely to prefer texting to talking. Some 55 percent of those who exchange more than 50 messages a day say they would rather get a text than a voice call. 

Young adults are the most avid texters by a wide margin. Cell owners between the ages of 18 and 24 exchange an average of 109.5 messages on a normal day—that works out to more than 3,200 texts per month—and the typical or median cell owner in this age group sends or receives 50 messages per day (or 1500 messages per month).

Overall, the survey found that both text messaging and phone calling on cell phones have leveled off for the adult population as a whole. Text messaging users send or receive an average of 41.5 messages on a typical day, with the median user sending or receiving 10 texts daily – both figures are largely unchanged from what we reported in 2010. Similarly, cell owners make or receive an average of 12 calls on their cells per day, which is unchanged from 2010.