As I’m sure you have seen in our Leisure eNewsletters, we follow a lot of research about the digital and social media worlds in order to better understand the disruptive impact they are having on location-based entertainment.
UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional Research Program has surveyed American college freshmen for 47 years, asking them about their demographics, high school experiences, college choices, attitudes toward issues, and future plans. Last fall they obtained data from 192,912 first-time, full-time students entering 283 four-year colleges and universities and recently reported the results in The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2012 report.
Amongst pages and pages of survey results, I found some interesting data concerning the time they spent with media entertainment and social media:
It appears that high school students spend a lot less time watching TV, on social media or playing video games than many reports would have us believe. Most amazing to me is the 45% reported NOT playing any video game during the previous week, whereas for example, a report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project reported that in 2008 virtually all American teens played computer, console, or cell phone games. Since the UCLA survey sample is so large, it’s hard to not believe the results are valid for the 41% of all high school seniors who went on to a four-year college in 2011.
About Randy White
Randy White is CEO and co-founder of the White Hutchinson Leisure & Learning Group. The 31-year-old company, with offices in Kansas City, Missouri, has worked for over 600 clients in 37 countries throughout the world. Projects the company has designed and produced have won seventeen 1st place awards. Randy is considered to be one of the world's foremost authorities on feasibility, brand development, design and production of leisure experience destinations including entertainment, eatertainment, edutainment, agritainment/agritourism, play and leisure facilities.
Randy was featured on the Food Network's Unwrapped television show as an eatertainment expert, quoted as an entertainment/edutainment center expert in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, New York Times and Time magazine and received recognition for family-friendly designs by Pizza Today magazine. One of the company's projects was featured as an example of an edutainment project in the book The Experience Economy. Numerous national newspapers have interviewed him as an expert on shopping center and mall entertainment and retail-tainment.
Randy is a graduate of New York University. Prior to repositioning the company in 1989 to work exclusively in the leisure and learning industry, White Hutchinson was active in the retail/commercial real estate industry as a real estate consultancy specializing in workouts/turnarounds of commercial projects. In the late 1960s to early 1980s, Randy managed a diversified real estate development company that developed, owned and managed over 2.0 million square feet of shopping centers and mixed-use projects and 2,000 acres of residential subdivisions. Randy has held the designations of CSM (Certified Shopping Center Manager) and Certified Retail Property Executive (CRX) from the International Council of Shopping Centers (ICSC).
He has authored over 150 articles that have been published in over 40 leading entertainment/leisure and early childhood education industry magazines and journals and has been a featured speaker and keynoter at over 40 different conventions and trade groups.
Randy is the editor of his company's Leisure eNewsletter, has a blog and posts on Twitter and Linkedin.
