Did you know that 1 out of 4 SimCity kids has got no friend? Our May-June 2003 survey focused on kids' interests and what role those interests have for the kids' relations with other kids.

We were thrilled by receiving about 220 replies to our survey, and with such a good feed back the survey results should be rather reliable. 70% av the kids that replied were girls. I'll comment on each of the questions below.

1. Which of these interests is your favourite?
The clear winning interest was Pets. 28% of SimCity kids are interested in pets. We do not know if this is affected by what kind of neighbourhood they live in, or if those kids do have their own pet, but either way it shows how popular pets are. The runners up are Music (19%), Aliens and Toys (both 15%). Only 1% said they are interested in Weather.

What should be a concern of the parents out there, is that only 8% of the kids are interested in School, but the next question might help some.

2. What is your grade at school?
It turned out that most kids to pretty well in school, despite their low interest score. 95% have a A or B grade, where of 74% have A grade. Only 2% said they have a D grade, and we assume that some of those poor kids will be sent off to Military School.

3. Find your best kid friend's favourite interest, how much do you like that interest? Must be kid friendship at 50 or stronger.
And now for the 2 questions (3 and 4) that we were most interested in, from a scientific view. We asked kids to tell us how much they liked the favourite interest of  their best friend. We thought that if interests play a greater role in the kids' social life, then we should find a tendency of kids liking their friend's favourite interest pretty much.

And we were right: 20% said they liked their friend's favourite interest 9 or 10, 22% 7 or 8. Only 9% like the interest lower than 3, and 8 % liked it 3 or 4. The graph shows that it's more common to like a friend's favourite interest than not to like it.

4. Find your best kid friend's least favourite interest, how much do you like that interest? Must be kid friendship at 50 or stronger.
We did a contra question by asking how much a kid likes a friend's least favourite interest. And the graph turned out to be opposite, just like we expected. 24% liked the friend's least favourite interest less than 3, 23% liked it 3 or 4. Only 8% liked it more than 8, and 5% liked it 7 or 8.

What did upset us more, was the fact that 25% said they have no friend out of the household (relation 50 or more). This means that 1/4 of the SimCity kids have got no friend outside the family - how sad is that!

5. How many interests do you like a lot (8, 9 or 10)?
Our survey went on, asking about how many interests kids like better than 7. It is most common to like 3 or 4 interests this much (48%), but in addition 25% answered they had 5 or more interests they liked better than 7. A total of nearly 3/4 of the SimCity kids seem to have a lot of interests!

6. How many interests do you not like (0, 1 or 2)?
Another contra question, and the result was that 43% said they liked 1 or 2 interests less than 3, and 29% said they liked 3 or 4 interests less than 3. 19% disliked 5 or more interests. This means that most kids are more likely to like than to dislike interests. 
 
 
 

Thank you to all who replied to our survey. Future surveys will be announced here.