Anna* uses her mom’s iPhone to complete her sixth-grade research project on the Carolina marshlands. She painstakingly switches between applications to review different sources and type up her report. When she struggles to upload it from home, her mom drives her to the public library’s parking lot so that she can log on to their open WiFi network and submit her homework.
Anna has a digital device and Internet access at home, but the connection is slow, and her parents often have to prioritize paying other bills first. The time and effort it takes her to complete her homework is wildly different from that of her classmates, who have laptops and reliable, high-speed broadband access.
Survey researchers who rely on yes/no questions like “Do you have home broadband access?” or “Do you have a device to connect to the Internet?” miss the critical ways that Anna and her classmates’ digital experiences differ. Yes/no questions cannot capture the experiences of millions of American households, like Anna’s, that are “under-connected”: those whose digital connectivity is less consistent and reliable than they would like it to be.
In this analysis, Bianca Reisdorf and I show how survey questions that measure under-connectedness, when compared with the yes/no measures most surveys still use to identify digital inequality, do a much better job of explaining variations in families’ technology experiences. We use national survey data from lower-income parents in the U.S. with school-aged children from 2021.
Slow, Broken Devices or Data Limits Cause Kids to Miss Online Learning
A year into remote and hybrid learning, we found that kids were much more likely to be missing online learning because the device they relied on was slow, broken, or unavailable because it was being shared between too many family members, rather than not having a device at all. We also found that when they couldn’t attend remote learning due to a lack of Internet connectivity, the real culprit was that their family had reached the data limit on their tablet or smartphone, or that their home Internet connection was too slow to support streaming video.
This is the latest in a series of studies using under-connected measures. Together, these studies show that it is time for survey researchers to move beyond traditional yes/no questions about digital access. Our under-connectedness measures can be deployed widely by researchers and policymakers to develop digital equity programs that can more effectively respond to the day-to-day challenges experienced by individuals, families, and communities.
To Develop Effective Interventions, We Need To Know What People Are Facing
Under-connected families don’t have no Internet; they just can’t rely on having it when needed, so more cost-effective options for high-speed broadband can make the difference. Likewise, they have digital devices, but need access to affordable local repair options when they break down.
Schools and local organizations can also deploy our under-connectedness measures as part of emergency preparedness plans. Here is an easy way to identify which community members would need assistance in an emergency that requires a quick, short-term pivot to remote learning or work, such as a snowstorm or hurricane.
We hope that under-connectedness, as a concept and set of survey measures, will enable researchers and policy makers to better track the issues and concerns that arise in an almost “fully connected” society in real time, and get closer to truly resolving stubborn digital inequalities.
*Anna is a pseudonym.
Vikki Katz, Ph.D., is Professor and Fletcher Jones Foundation Endowed Chair in Free Speech at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
Contributor: Bianca Reisdorf, University of North Carolina.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Internet Society.
Image via Freepik