rfmcdonald | [LINK] "How Canadian and American youth are different" (Reply)

This, carried by the Toronto Star, is the sort of thing that makes me skeptical. Using online polls? Yeah, that's a well-grounded method.

Regardless, here's her findings. Some of them fit common wisdom, though whether or not common wisdom is accurate is another thing entirely.

Canadians from 18 to 34 travel more, recycle more, charge more, play the lottery more, marry less, text-message less and rent more than their American counterparts, the Ipsos Reid study revealed.

"Americans come through as a little more grounded, more domestic. Canadians are more of the free-spirit type," Samantha McAra, a 26-year-old senior research manager in Calgary with the polling company, said Friday.

"My friends and I, we're renting, not married, have careers, like to travel. The environment thing, too. If someone doesn't recycle, it's sort of like you look at that person and they're sort of judged."

McAra wrote the questions for the survey, which asked 1,000 people on each side of the border to respond online. The traditional telephone poll wouldn't work for a demographic in which 34 per cent of Americans and 19 per cent of Canadians only have a cellphone, she said.

McAra may be smack in the middle of the "emerging market group," as she calls it, but even she was baffled by some of the 10 social networking groups on the final list, sites such as imeem.com and ning.com. But even they had six and three people registered, respectively, among those polled.

Facebook is the social networking site of choice for Canadians, at 81 per cent registered, compared to 57 per cent for Americans. In the U.S., 54 per cent are signed onto MySpace, compared with 23 per cent of young Canadians.

Companies are increasingly interested in the 18-to-34-year-old market, McAra said, because they have healthy incomes and the urge to acquire; baby boomers, on the other hand, have the incomes but not as strong a need to spend.