Contextualizing connectivity: how internet connection type and parental factors influence technology use among lower-income children

ABSTRACT

This project links research on digital inequality, which focuses on connection quality and its outcomes for under-connected individuals, and parental mediation, which focuses on the influence of parents on children’s technology experiences. We examine the internet connection type used by families, the technology experiences of lower-income parents, and their perceptions of opportunities that technology use offers their children. We then determine how these factors influence the frequency and scope of their school-age children’s technology use. Findings show that contextualizing children’s connectivity to account for infrastructural, socio-demographic, and relational influences provides new insights into the technology experiences of lower-income children. One set of findings suggests that direct benefit from increased connectivity is most evident for lower-income parents – those with the lowest household incomes, lowest levels of education, and whose dominant language is not English. These effects remain after controlling for other socio-demographic factors. The second set of results shows that greater connectivity increases how frequently both children and parents use the internet, but is associated only with a greater scope of internet activities for parents. Parents’ online activity scope is important for their children’s online experiences, directly predicting the scope of their online activities. High-scope parents were also significantly more likely to see digital opportunities in their children’s internet use, which in turn also predicted more frequent and broader internet use by their children. We conclude by considering the practical implications of these findings for digital equity initiatives targeting lower-income families.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestication of ICTs
• digital divide
• young people
• digital inclusion
• families
• parental mediation
• children

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Vikki S. Katz (Ph.D. University of Southern California, 2007) is an Associate Professor in Communication, and Affiliate Graduate Faculty in Sociology, at Rutgers University. Her research focuses on intergenerational communication dynamics in low-income and immigrant families, and how those dynamics relate to experiences of digital inequality and modes of social incorporation [email: [email protected]].

Meghan Bridgid Moran (Ph.D. University of Southern California, 2009) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Health, Behavior & Society at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health. She studies how communication, media and culture affect health outcomes, with an emphasis on health disparities and adolescents [email: [email protected]].

Katherine Ognyanova (Ph.D. University of Southern California, 2013) is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at Rutgers University. She does work in the areas of computational social science and network analysis. Her research has a broad focus on the impact of technology on social structures, political and civic engagement, and the media system [[email protected]].

Notes

1 Parents qualified to participate in the survey if they reported a household income of $65,000 or lower; the national median for families with one or more children under 18 was slightly below this level in 2015 (specifically, $63,767), per the Annual Social and Economic Supplement, Table FINC-03 of the Current Population Survey. Retrieved from http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/cpstables/032015/faminc/toc.htm

2 We initially explored differences in outcomes by gender. We found no significant differences and therefore did not include gender as a covariate in our models.

3 The analyses described here were also replicated using data weighted to reflect the distribution of the lower-income parent population along known parameters. The results (available on request) were very similar to those reported here.

4 See www.everyoneon.org/connect2compete

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation [grant number OPP1098351].