Digital inclusion through mobile phones?: A comparison between mobile-only and computer users in internet access, skills and use

ABSTRACT

Given the rapid rise of mobile-only users, we investigated the digital inclusion process through smartphones. By using Chile as a case study, a country that has strongly promoted mobile connections to address internet access gaps, we compared mobile-only and computer users in different dimensions of the digital inclusion process, including digital skills and differentiated uses of the web. By relying on a face-to-face national representative survey, the results showed that smartphones represent an opportunity to access the internet for those who traditionally lag behind. However mobile-only use does not necessarily lead to a more complete digital inclusion process because it was related to lower levels of skills and less diverse types of uses of the web compared to those people who also use the computer. Also, skills partially mediated the association between access device and types of uses of the web, which suggests that the differences by access device partly occur because people have greater chances to develop skills when accessing the web through computers.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital inclusion
• digital inequality
• mobile phones
• digital skills
• internet access
• internet use

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Teresa Correa (PhD, University of Texas at Austin), is associate professor in the School of Communication at Universidad Diego Portales. Her research interests focus on digital media access and use, media sociology and mixed methods. Her work has appeared in more than 30 journal publications and book chapters, including Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, Telecommunications Policy, among others [email: [email protected]].

Isabel Pavez holds a PhD in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is also a journalist (Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile) and has a master’s degree in Anthropology (University of Chile). She specializes in Internet adoption and qualitative methodologies. She works as an academic in the Communications Department at Universidad de Los Andes in Chile.

Javier Contreras holds a Sociology degree from Universidad Diego Portales. He has been research assistant in several projects and currently works as data analyst at the City of Peñalolén, Santiago, Chile.

Notes

1 Access to internet is mainly made by smartphones and computers. For example, while 90% of households have smartphones and 78% have computers, only 27% have tablets, 15% gaming consoles and 19% TV. (Subtel, 2016).

2 Chile’s overall speed of mobile connection is 9.70 Mbps while European countries is around 14.0 Mbps and the leading countries like South Korea reach over 37.0 Mbps.

3 There is a small percentage (7%) who has internet access only through computers and not smartphones. They were treated as missing cases.

4 The causal-step approach from Baron and Kenny (1986) suggests that if the direct effect of access device on types of internet uses decreases or is no longer significant once the mediating variable (i.e., skills) is introduced, then there is a partial of full mediation.

5 The conditional process analysis developed by Hayes (2013) is based on a path analytic approach of ordinary least squared regressions and offers an estimate and a bootstrapped confidence interval that quantify the mediating (or indirect) effect of access device on types of internet uses channeled through digital skills, controlling for other variables. It also allows to detect a significant indirect effect even though one of the constituent relationships or paths is not (Hayes, 2009)

Additional information

Funding

This study was part of a project funded by Chile's National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (Fondecyt 1170324).