Dimensions of Internet use: amount, variety, and types

Abstract

We examine the dimensions of Internet use based on a representative sample of the population of the UK, making three important contributions. First, we clarify theoretical dimensions of Internet use that have been conflated in prior work. We argue that the property space of Internet use has three main dimensions: amount of use, variety of different uses, and types of use. Second, the Oxford Internet Survey 2011 data set contains a comprehensive set of 48 activities ranging from email to online banking to gambling. Using the principal components analysis, we identify 10 distinctive types of Internet activities. This is the first typology of Internet uses to be based on such a comprehensive set of activities. We use regression analyses to validate the three dimensions and to identify the characteristics of the users of each type. Each type has a distinctive and different kind of user. The Internet is an extremely diverse medium. We cannot discuss ‘Internet use’ as a general phenomenon; instead, researchers must specify what kind of use they examine.

Keywords:

• Internet use
• typology
• principal components analysis
• Oxford Internet Survey
• activity types

Notes on contributors

Grant Blank is the Survey Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford. He is editor (with Nigel Fielding and Raymond Lee) of the Handbook of Online Research Methods and numerous other publications on the Internet. His special interests are the social impact of computers and the Internet, statistical and qualitative methods, and cultural sociology [email: [email protected]].

Darja Groselj is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, UK. Her research examines how various characteristics of the individuals’ Internet use environment shape their Internet use patterns. Darja is currently also working as a Survey Research Assistant for the OxIS project [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1. We also excluded studies that contain the Internet in a more general typology of media use, and market reports or attempts to segment Internet users for marketing purposes.

2. Note, however, that Brandtzæg (2010) is not consistent in the number of identified dimensions – he proposes three separate dimensions on pages 940 and 954; and four separate dimensions on page 951 and in Table 6.

3. We identified only one study that develops a typology of Internet users based on one conceptual dimension: Livingstone and Helsper (2007).

4. Our activity variables are ordinal; Kolenikov and Angeles (2004) found that ordinal variables work effectively in a PCA. Although we present results from Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients, we also tried Spearman rank-order correlations with substantively identical results. We also did a cluster analysis which produced identical substantive results.

5. Vice activities are subject to social desirability effects. To minimize these they are not part of the regular interview, instead they are in an anonymous, self-completion questionnaire.