Any time and any place, no matter what’s going on around them, college students will text.

Alan Mozes of CBS News.

College students admit texting in the most inappropriate places

Many college students send or receive text messages more than 100 times each day and at the most inappropriate times and places, a new study finds.

How inappropriate? According to a poll involving more than 150 college-age students, many admit to hitting “send” while on a date, during sex, in the shower, in the middle of religious services or even while at a funeral.

The same poll found that many of those texting agreed that this “inappropriate texting” was socially frowned-upon bad behavior. But they just couldn’t help themselves.

“People are going to text in these situations but they know it isn’t the right thing to do,” said study lead author Marissa Harrison, an associate professor of psychology at Penn State Harrisburg in Middletown, Penn.

“As an example, most people in our study said that it is wrong to text someone while talking in-person to someone else, but most of them did it anyway,” she said. “Similarly, most people said that texting others while on a date is not the right thing to do, but they did that anyway, too.”

The findings were published online recently in the Social Science Journal.

The new study polled respondents from a mid-sized university in the northeastern United States. Nearly 60 percent of the respondents were women, averaging just under 20 years of age. The 70-question poll asked participants to gauge how much they texted per day, how often they checked their incoming texts, whether or not they had ever texted in 33 different social scenarios, and whether they thought texting in each scenario was appropriate.

The result: More than one-third of the students said they send and/or receive at least 100 texts a day, and check their messages (on average) nearly 16 times an hour.