16 de agosto de 2012

Report: Young Lapsed Users of internet in the U.K.


16 August 2012 Oxford Internet Institute

Why are around 10% of young people outside the digital mainstream? What do they feel about it? Read the new report: Understanding Low and Discontinued Internet Use Amongst Young People in Britain


Executive summary 
In the UK, the Internet has become an important feature of the lives of the majority of young people for all aspects of their lives. However, there is a significant minority of young people who are not able to navigate or connect properly with the online world. They are, in other words, outside the digital mainstream. 
Evidence for this group has been found in nationally representative surveys, where around 10% of young people (aged 17–23) define themselves as lapsed Internet users. That is, they used to use the Internet but no longer do so (OxIS, 2011). 
This study aims to find out more about this group. Specifically we aim to: 
 Examine why young people are outside the digital mainstream, and determine the extent to which this is due to reasons of exclusion or choice. 
 Explore the implications this has in their daily lives. 
 Consider how the experiences of these young people can inform the digital inclusion strategy in the UK. 

This nine month qualitative study investigated these objectives in four overlapping steps: a literature review of academic research and policy documents; analysis of the Oxford Internet Survey (2011) and the Learner and their Context Survey (2009), which contain valuable information on lapsed Internet users; 36 in–depth interviews with young people who consider themselves to be infrequent or lapsed Internet users; and a workshop with key experts in the field. 
On the periphery? 
From a review of the literature we provide a conceptual framework for the study based on digital inclusion literature and theories of adolescence and developmental psychology. Digital exclusion is a multifaceted issue and from our analysis of the literature we provide a set of five factors or resources that need to be considered when understanding (non) use of the Internet by young people. They are: 
 Psychological (attitudes, motivations and agency towards the Internet and everyday life). 
 Cognitive (operational skills, critical skills, literacy and awareness of opportunity). 
 Physical (quality of Internet access, access to, and use of, other technologies). 
 Socio–cultural (family, friends, peers, school, work, community). 
 Material (occupation, income, education). 

These five resources operate together with young people’s life spheres to help us to understand their (non) use of the Internet. We suggest that these five factors – the psychological, the cognitive, the physical, the socio–cultural and the material – together define the technological resourcefulness of a young person and determine his/her ability to access and meaningfully interact with the Internet. 
A typology of discontinued Internet use by young people 
From a qualitative analysis of the data from two previous national surveys (OxIS and Becta1) , we developed a qualitative account of each individual who was identified as a lapsed Internet user based on their responses to relevant items in each survey. 200 items were used for this process from the OxIS data set and 150 items from the Becta data set. These items were selected based on their relevance and used as proxy measures for the five factors outlined above. 
1 For full details of the objectives and sampling process for the Learner and their Context and OxIS surveys please see Eynon (2009) and Dutton and Blank (2011). 
Using analytical approaches from the qualitative tradition, we developed a typology of discontinued Internet use, where we identified five groups that could be distinguished from one another in relation to psychological, cognitive, physical, socio–cultural and material aspects of inequality in relation to their engagement with the Internet. 
Group 1: identified themselves as discontinued Internet users primarily due to reasons of access and cost. However, in all other respects they demonstrated a number of characteristics that suggest that they were very close (if not almost part) of the digital mainstream. Thus in this group the most important factors in explaining discontinued Internet use are material and physical. 4 

Group 2: considered themselves as discontinued Internet users as they have poorer quality of access to the Internet than they have experienced in the past. The most important factors in explaining discontinued Internet use in this group are material and physical. However, other support to use the Internet (i.e. socio–cultural aspects) could be stronger as could level of skills (cognitive aspects). 
Group 3: hold many of the characteristics of the second group and also define themselves as discontinued Internet users’ as they have poorer quality of access to the Internet than they have experienced in the past. However, they differ in terms of attitudes, not seeing the Internet as important for finding out or learning new things; they also have lower levels of self–concept for learning, and are less positive about their skills to use the Internet. Thus more factors come into play: material, physical and to some extent psychological and cognitive factors. 
Group 4: have a wider range of reasons for not using the Internet, often based around a combination of access, cost, skills and interest. The most common (and often only) reason to begin to use the Internet was because they had to use it for school. For this group there are typically some challenges with all factors: psychological, cognitive, physical, socio–cultural and material, often faring negatively on all five. 
Group 5: while groups 1–4 can be seen as a kind of straightforward progression away from the digital mainstream and away from a “proximity” to the Internet, the final main group is a little different as community and other close social networks seem to influence motivation and need. Group 5 typically encounter some challenges with all five factors: psychological, cognitive, physical, socio–cultural and material. However these operate in a different way to the same factors that are apparent in group 4. 
These five typologies suggest that prevalent user and non–user dichotomies and popular definitions of use and non–use of the Internet need to be reconsidered. 
Living outside the digital mainstream 
We interviewed 36 individuals aged 17–23 who considered themselves to be outside the digital mainstream. 
To recruit young people to this study, we first tried to contact participants from the two national surveys (OxIS and Becta) who responded to the survey question about whether they “used the Internet at home, school work or anywhere else” by selecting the option “No but I used it in the past.” We also used the survey data to build profiles of the kinds of young people we would like to interview and then recruited these young people via a range of networks and gatekeepers. 
The data made it clear that what it means to be an Internet user (or not) is not a straightforward concept. In line with the work of others (Haddon, 2004; Livingstone and Helsper, 2007; Murdock, 2002; Wyatt, 2003); we argue that through the messier lens of qualitative research, the categories of use and non use of the Internet becomes far more blurred. We recommend that more research and debate is required about meaningful use of the Internet and what it means to be someone who defines themselves as an Internet user. 
All the people we spoke to were undergoing some kind of transition in their lives, and while we do not wish to provide a firm or final set of categories, we identified five main groups or primary transitions in their lives: 
 Young people who were homeless or in temporary housing, and whose priority was to find a permanent, or at least more stable, home. 
 Young people who had become new parents and were making the transition from independent adults to primary carers for another person. 
 Young people who were unemployed or in part time or temporary jobs who were focused on trying to get a job that would provide them with some stability and security. 
 Young people were trying to get their life “back on track”, typically after a period of crime and falling in with the “wrong crowd”. 
 Immigrants and refugees who had recently come to the UK and were trying to start a life in Britain. 

While of course, none of these transitions are completely distinct from one another, and indeed tend to overlap, they are useful and provide another dimension to the five groups identified in the survey data. 
The role the Internet played or could play in the lives of the young people we interviewed varied, from those who felt they already had too many other things going on in their lives for the Internet to feature heavily, to those who saw the Internet as an important tool to assist them in achieving their goals. 
In relation to the five factors or resources that need to be considered when exploring (non) Internet use we found the following themes in our interview data: 
Psychological resources 
Everyone we spoke to recognised the near ubiquity of the Internet amongst their peer group and saw it as a part of life in the 21st century. 
 All interviewees held a very tool based and functional attitude towards going online, with no evidence of a more experiential or participatory approach. 
 Those who had directly experienced a negative situation online that had resulted in a level of harm, both online and offline, often had very few psychological resources to use the Internet. 

Cognitive resources 
Some interviewees had problems with core literacy skills, which had clear implications for the extent to which people engaged with the Internet. 
 Email was a common function that was discussed, and not a function that all our interviewees used or knew how to use properly, which had implications for job seeking. 
 Search skills and the ability to judge the quality of information were mixed. 
 A lack of skills were compounded by others’ assumptions that they should be able to work out what to do online. This made them less likely to ask for help or support. 
 Most interviewees had limited ideas of what may be possible with the Internet due to inadequate previous experience. 

Physical resources 
Mobile phones were typically considered to be very important for communication, and for the majority of interviewees their phone better met their social needs than the Internet. 
 Some owned a smartphone, but this device was not always connected to the Internet. 
 Those who had any kind of experience of using the Internet on a mobile device tended to describe this experience in quite limiting ways due to issues of download speed, usability of small devices and cost. 
 Of all possible sources, social and technological, face to face contact with people they knew and trusted was probably the most important information source for this group. 
 Libraries, Internet cafes, youth clubs, and friends’ wifi were all cited as Internet access opportunities, with those closer to the digital mainstream being more likely to use the Internet at libraries. 
 A change in access seemed to make a striking difference to how people felt about their level of connection to the online world. 
 The degree to which the people we interviewed were satisfied with their level of access varied, but for many it was not sufficient and led to the missing out of opportunities. 

Socio–cultural resources 
Few of the participants tended to recall significant support from their parents or guardians when learning to use the Internet. They were unlikely to have ever had a computer and Internet access at home. 
 School was often the first place they had used a computer and been shown how to use the Internet. However, due to the skills taught and the blocking of sites the experience was quite limited. Few had managed to maintain, let alone build upon, their uses of the Internet since leaving school. 
 The level of support to use the Internet that young people received when they needed it from access locations such as jobcentre plus, youth centers, connexions, shelters and the library varied considerably. 
 Friends and younger family members were sometimes useful for proxy use of the Internet; our interviewees were often the only one in their peer group who did not use the Internet. 


Sometimes face to face networks were so strong that young people did not need to go online for social purposes. In other instances, even very limited use of the Internet could support friendships that would otherwise have lapsed. 
 The social–cultural contexts that surrounded young people were very important, but we did not find many instances where these contexts tended to extend or develop their uses of the Internet in any meaningful way. These young people had limited amounts of social capital with respect to this aspect of their lives, indeed, some of them seemed to feel very isolated. 

Material resources 
Many of these young people did not have significant resource with respect to education, occupation and income, and this undoubtedly had an influence on their (non) Internet use. 
 Those who had experienced unsuccessful engagements with education often looked back with regret and wished they had acted more wisely at school, both to get a general education and also to learn about the Internet. 
 As would be expected, the lack of material resources in terms of income had a particular impact on having Internet access for many, although not all of the participants. 
 Not having an occupation seemed to heighten the need for most young people to use the Internet in order to search for jobs and housing. 

The combination of these five factors, together with a person’s subjective need to use the Internet, determines the meaningfulness of their interaction with the Internet. Sometimes significant resourcefulness on one or more of the five factors can overcome issues incurred by having a low level of resourcefulness on another factor. For others, problems with just one factor can lead to significant ramifications in terms of their (non) use of the Internet. 
Foci for policy and practice initiatives 
The widely held and very powerful assumption by government, commercial organizations and the wider public that all young people are frequent and confident users of the Internet is inaccurate. However, this public assumption that the current generation of youth is ‘born digital’ is so powerful that it has informed numerous policies and initiatives that determine young people’s lives. 
On its own, the UK government ‘digital by default’ strategy is not appropriate for this group, and poses a threat for young people with restricted resources (psychological, cognitive, socio cultural, physical or material), who are high users of government services but infrequent and limited users of the Internet. Thus, other support alongside this strategy is required. 
From our analysis we would propose strategies that: 
 Facilitate connections between young people who used to be outside the digital mainstream and those who are currently still living outside the digital mainstream. 
 Allow for the possibility that young people may need support in using the Internet and enable young people to identify problems with their skill sets that they have with going online. 
 Improve the quality of physical access to computers and the Internet for these young people. 
 Move forward with educational initiatives to ensure all young people have an opportunity to fully explore the online world and develop all the skills needed to support that process while in education. 
 Create initiatives that may develop and extend social capital for these young people. 

As this group is willing to use the Internet and see it as a normal and necessary part of life we believe that successful intervention is possible. 

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