Help wanted: young adults’ sources of support for questions about digital media

ABSTRACT

Social support can play a critical role in the development of Internet skills. Research on support-seeking for digital media use has primarily considered informal sources such as family and friends, and formal sources such as people employed to provide assistance. Yet, people may also seek support online. Social network sites and other online communities are often used to ask questions on a wide range of topics from both friends and strangers. Drawing on a survey of young adults aged 25–26, we find that online question-asking, although used less frequently than informal and formal support, is a relevant source of support, which expands users’ available resources and has the potential to improve Internet skills. Results show that Internet skills and social capital explain differences in support-seeking behaviors among young adults informing our understanding of how inequities in social support, and ultimately digital inequalities, manifest themselves in this realm of Internet use.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital divide
• internet skills
• social support
• young adults
• survey
• digital inequality

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Robert and Kaye Hiatt Fund at Northwestern University for their support of the project upon which this study is based. They thank the numerous research assistants over the years who assisted the data collection effort, especially Cierra Levy, Sam Mandlsohn, Richard Herndon, Devon Moore, and Bob Babich for their work on the last wave of the project. The authors would like to thank the participants of a research seminar held at the Institute of Communication and Media Research, at the University of Zurich, in which an earlier version of this paper was presented.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Marina Micheli contributed to this publication when she was a Senior Researcher at the Institute of Communication and Media Research of the University of Zurich. Recently, she joined the European Commission's Joint Research Centre as a Project Officer. She conducted research on digital inequality, young people and digital media, Internet skills, digital literacy, and other societal dimensions of ICT adoption and use. Her most recent project explores datafication and its implications for governance [email: [email protected]].

Elissa M. Redmiles is a PhD Candidate at the University of Maryland, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a Facebook Fellow. Her research interests are broadly in the areas of security and privacy: she uses computational, economic, and social science methods to understand users' security and privacy decision-making processes [email: [email protected]].

Eszter Hargittai is Professor and Chair of Internet Use and Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. Her research examines how people may benefit from their digital media uses and how differences in people's Web-use skills influence what they do online. Her recent work on digital inequality is especially focused on what explains varying levels of online participation [email: [email protected]].

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Research on the design of Q&A sites, questions posted, effectiveness of online question-asking, and reputation mechanisms has been carried over within literature on HCI (e.g. Patil & Lee, 2016; Paul, Hong, & Chi, 2012).