A new study by the Pew Research Center suggest that teenage girls are more susceptible to having compulsive texting habits than teenage boys, and the girls’ grades and academic performance is suffering because of the malady.

The study, as reported in Time, found what most parents of teens already knew, that texting is highly popular among the age group, with 63 percent of them reporting that they send and receive 167 texts per day on average.

Only 35 percent of the group in the study reported actual face-to-face contact outside of the school setting.

The research was done on 403 students in a Midwestern town, from the 8th through the 11th grade in school, and was about half and half, male and female.  The study wanted to compare texting among users whose texting would be considered “compulsive” as opposed to those who only reported texting frequently.

So the researchers created a “compulsive texting scale” by asking the students questions like, “Do you find yourself frustrated because you want to text but you have to wait?” and “Do you fear that life without texting would be boring and unhappy?”

Those findings, while showing that boys and girls text at about the same frequency, about 20 percent more girls are were classified as “compulsive.”  The results also found a link between compulsive texting and lower grade scores, and that girls academic performance was more likely to be affected.

It is suspected that the reasons boys and girls text is a major factor in the findings of the study.  Boys send texts to their peers as a way to provide information, while girls rely on their texts to develop a relationship, whether with the family or in a romantic setting, or interact socially with their friends and classmates.