Children’s interaction with the Internet: time dedicated to communications and games

ABSTRACT

In the context of growing interest of individuals in the Internet, the literature has not paid attention to the uses of time for children, given the scarcity of appropriate data bases that provide accurate information. To partially cover this gap, we now provide here evidence of the time that children aged between 10 and 12 years dedicate to two online activities: computer communication and computer gaming. To that end, we estimate a simultaneous seemingly unrelated regressions (SUR) model with data from the Spanish Time Use Survey for 2009–2010. Results indicate that being female generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer communication, and being male generates a positive influence on the time devoted to computer gaming. We also find that a greater number of family members with secondary studies generates a positive influence on the time spent on computer gaming. Children with better health spend more time on both of these activities and, finally, living in a larger city produces a positive effect on the time dedicated to computer gaming.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• Internet
• leisure time
• SUR model

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D12
• J13
• J22

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ The SUR model has been used to describe the simultaneity of consumption goods (see, for example, for the case of Spain, Molina, Campaña, and Ortega 2015, 2016; for cultural goods)

² Computer communication refers to time dedicated to reading, writing and sending emails; chat via the internet; other computer communications such as videoconferencing. Informatics games refers to time dedicate to video games, computer games and mobile phone games.

³ Studies of time use as Gimenez-Nadal and Molina (2013), Gimenez -Nadal and Molina (2014), Campaña., et al (2015) have used this classification.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from the Spanish Ministry of Economics [Project ECO2012-34828] is gratefully acknowledged.