It’s a given that many children will ask their parents for cell phones this Christmas. Now, a recent study by University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) sociologist Shelia Cotten, Ph.D., finds that the way the kids will use their new phones depends on their gender. In a study of nearly 1,000 middle-school students, students were asked to rate the different ways they use their cell phone on a five-point scale, from zero meaning "Never" to 5 meaning "Several Times a Day." The study found that boys scored higher than girls for using their cell phones to play games, share pictures and videos, listen to music and/or send e-mails, even after accounting for how much the students liked using their phones and how skilled they were at using them, says Cotten, whose study appears in the current issue of the journal New Media & Society. UAB Associate Professor Shelia Cotten, Ph.D., discusses new study. Credit: University of Alabama at Birmingham