In telephone interviews, we surveyed parents in 1,735 randomly-chosen households with children ages two to 17 to explore how they use the Internet–and to find out about families that don't use the Internet. Separately, we also surveyed 601 children ages nine to 17 in these households. We invited parents to listen in on another telephone line to hear their children's survey answers; almost one in four parents did so.

In households with more than one child, parents were asked to answer questions about the Internet experiences of just one child, selected randomly.

The survey gathered information from parents and children about these topics:

• household and respondent demographics (such as age, income, race and gender);
• online access locations (such as home, school, friends' homes and libraries);
• online activities (such as Internet, e-mail, chat rooms, instant messaging, school research and games);
• other activities (such as reading, socializing, watching television, listening to music, playing outdoors, and doing arts and crafts);
• online supervision (such as parental monitoring and online time limits);
• attitudes about the Internet; and
• barriers for nonusers of the Internet.

The full survey sample of parents produces statistically significant results, with a margin of error of 2.4 percent. The full sample of children produces statistically significant results, with a margin of error of 4 percent. Individual questions asked of smaller subsets of respondents have a higher margin of error. In this report, we have made an effort to cite differences in responses only when the differences are statistically significant to the 95 percent confidence interval.

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