Gender and the Internet

Objective. This article examines whether there are differences in men's and women's use of the Internet and whether any such gender gaps have changed in recent years. Methods. We use data from several surveys during the period 1997–2001 to show trends in Internet usage and to estimate regression models of Internet usage that control for individuals' socioeconomic characteristics. Results. Women were significantly less likely than men to use the Internet at all in the mid–1990s, but this gender gap in being online disappeared by 2000. However, once online, women remain less frequent and less intense users of the Internet. Conclusions. There is little reason for concern about sex inequalities in Internet access and usage now, but gender differences in frequency and intensity of Internet usage remain.     

Differences in Actual and Perceived Online Skills: The Role of Gender*

Objective. The literature on gender and technology use finds that women and men differ significantly in their attitudes toward their technological abilities. Concurrently, existing work on science and math abilities of students suggests that such perceived differences do not always translate into actual disparities. We examine the yet‐neglected area concerning gender differences with respect to Internet‐use ability. In particular, we test how self‐perceived abilities are related to actual abilities and how these may differ by gender. Methods. We use new data on web‐use skill to test empirically whether there are differences in men's and women's abilities to navigate online content. We draw on a diverse sample of adult Internet users to investigate the questions raised. Results. Findings suggest that men and women do not differ greatly in their online abilities. However, we find that women's self‐assessed skill is significantly lower than that of men. Conclusions. Women's lower self‐assessment regarding their web‐use skills may affect significantly the extent of their online behavior and the types of uses to which they put the medium. We discuss the implications of these findings for social inequality.     

The importance of type, amount, and timing of internet use for understanding psychological distress

Objective. Few social scientists have examined how Internet usage, including using the Internet for health purposes, may affect mental health. This study assesses whether the type or amount of online health activities and the timing of Internet use are associated with psychological distress.Methods. We use data from the National Cancer Institute's 2005 Health Information National Trends Survey.Results. When we compare Internet users to non-Internet users, using the Internet and using the Internet for health purposes are negatively associated with distress. However, among Internet users, the number of online health activities is positively associated with distress. Greater distress is also associated with using the Internet on weekdays and looking online for information on sun protection.Conclusions. Internet usage is not necessarily positively associated with psychological distress. The effects depend on the type, amount, and timing of Internet usage.     

The Associations Between Socioeconomic Status,Caregivers' Depressive Symptoms,Children's Health‐Promoting Behavior,and Children's Physical Health: A Mediation Model

The aim of this study was to examine the mediating effects of children's health‐promoting behaviors on the association between socioeconomic status, caregivers' depressive symptoms, and children's physical health outcomes. We used the first wave of “Seoul Education and Health Welfare Panel.” Data were collected from 820 fourth‐grade elementary and first‐year middle school students and their caregivers using self‐administered surveys. Structural equation modeling was employed to analyze the mediating effects of health‐promoting behaviors. Bias‐corrected bootstrap confidence intervals were used to test the mediating effect. The results showed that both low socioeconomic status and caregivers' depressive symptoms were negatively associated with a child's health‐promoting behaviors. Children's health‐promoting behaviors were positively associated with physical health. However, children's physical health was not significantly associated with socioeconomic status but was marginally associated with caregivers' depressive symptoms. We found that children's health‐promoting behaviors significantly mediated associations between both socioeconomic status and children's physical health and between caregivers' depressive symptoms and children's physical health. Based on the findings, we suggest the development and implementation of school‐based, health‐enhancement programs as a means to improve the general health of all children and to reduce health inequalities.     

While the Cat's Away,Do the Mice Play? Maternal Employment and the After‐School Activities of Adolescents*

Objective. This study determines if a relationship exists between a mother's employment and the activities in which her adolescent children participate after school. Methods. The author uses panel data from the 1996 Survey of Income and Program Participation with logit and fixed‐effects logit models to estimate this relationship. Results. Fixed‐effects models suggest a positive relationship between maternal employment and participation in lessons after school for the adolescent children of married women and also for those with at least a high school education. Maternal employment is also positively related to sports participation for the adolescent children of unmarried mothers. Conclusions. First, this article shows the importance of accounting for unobserved heterogeneity in inquiries into the links between maternal employment and adolescent outcomes. Second, it suggests that high‐socioeconomic‐status mothers may use after‐school activities, particularly lessons, as a form of after‐school care, while unmarried mothers may use sports.     

Sibling Similarities and Differences in Time Use: A Pattern-Analytic, Within-Family Approach

Similarities and differences in adolescent siblings' free time activities were investigated. Firstborns and second‐borns from 181 predominantly White, working, and middle‐class families reported on their time use and sibling relationships. Their parents reported on their socioeconomic status and neighborhood characteristics. Cluster analysis identified three groups of sibling dyads: Cluster 1 differentiated in leisure and time with friends, Cluster 2 differentiated in instrumental activities and time alone, and Cluster 3 did not differentiate in time use. Multinomial logistic regressions revealed that the longitudinal links between sibling relationship qualities and cluster membership were moderated by firstborns' sex. Findings highlight the importance of person‐oriented analytic strategies for understanding sibling similarities and differences and of within‐family variability in youth's time use.     

Ping‐pong poms: emotional reflexivity in contemporary return migration from Australia to the United Kingdom

About 20,000 people from the United Kingdom emigrate to Australia each year. Of these, a significant number return to the United Kingdom, and some return again to Australia. Studies of such patterns of migration and return (and return again) were quite common a few decades ago, but are now rare. This paper makes use of a contemporary data source – an Internet‐mediated discussion forum – to explore the experiences of modern ‘ping‐pong poms’. A picture emerges of these migrants as exercising emotional reflexivity in dealing with the pull of family left behind, ‘homesickness’, the lack of a sense of belonging and their often‐disappointed dreams of a ‘better life’. By understanding the importance of emotions in people's decisions about return migration, policy can better attend to the realities of more mobile lives.     

Changing the default setting for information privacy protection: What and whose personal information can be better protected?

With Internet service providers (ISPs) increasingly demanding personal information to develop personalized services, people have become more vulnerable to privacy infringement. As a way to protect individuals’ privacy, industrialized countries have implemented a “notice-and-consent” requirement, meaning an ISP must obtain users’ consent to collect personal information in the course of the ISP's business. Drawing on prospect theory and earlier work on information privacy and behavioral science, in this study, we administered an online survey experiment to test whether the giving of consent differs between ‘opt-in’ and ‘opt-out’ frames. The framing effect was found to be moderated by personal information type, people's attitudes toward privacy, and people's privacy infringement experience. The results indicate that the opt-in frame better protects users’ information privacy, and the framing effect is magnified when the targeted information concerns online activities, when users have weakly held privacy attitudes, and when users have less experience of privacy infringement.     

Adolescents' Time Use and Academic Achievement: A Test of the Reproduction and Mobility Models*

Objectives. Following up on Bourdieu's (1973) model of reproduction and DiMaggio's (1982) model of mobility, I determine whether there are socioeconomic differences in the academic benefits provided by adolescents' use of free time. Methods. I analyze the associations that students' uses of time have with mathematics achievement test scores and grade point averages, using data from the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 and OLS regression models. Results. Time spent on school‐sponsored activities is associated with improved math test scores, while time spent on social activities is negatively associated with them. School activities are more beneficial for students in the bottom SES quartile than in the top two SES quartiles. Conclusions. Limited support is found for the mobility model; however, lower‐SES students are more likely to engage in activities such as television watching and videogame playing that are associated with lower test scores and grades, and higher‐SES students are more likely to participate in beneficial school‐sponsored activities.     

Gender equity and women's contraception use

Gender equity describes the distribution between men and women of social and material resources and decision‐making powers. Women's experiences of gender equity are likely to influence their contraceptive use. Multilevel analysis of two databases: the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles from the United Kingdom and the United Nations' Fertility and Family Surveys, was undertaken to explore the association between gender equity measured at two spatial scales (small areas and countries) and women's contraception use. Results suggest that the spatial scale at which gender equity is considered is important. Gender equity was associated with contraception use at a local level, but not at the country level. Further, gender equity (at a local level) benefited women with less education in terms of increasing their likelihood of contraception use compared with more highly educated women. Results suggest gender equity is a potential pathway to reducing socio‐economic inequalities in health in developed settings.     

Adolescent Religiosity and School Contexts*

Objectives. Schools serve as the primary social organizations for adolescents, structuring their lives and conveying a variety of skills, norms, and values, but relatively little is known about how schools influence the development of religious belief, attitudes, and behavior during adolescence. We explore how schools' religious norms, coupled with adolescents' pursuit of social status through conformity, affect public and private religiosity. Methods. Employing data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), we use multilevel modeling to examine the impact of school context on adolescents' public and private religiosity. Results. We find that school norms are influential in shaping both public religious expressions and private devotional activities, but pursuit of social status is a motivation for change across religious contexts only of public religious activity. The effect of social status as a motivator of religious change was moderated by the strength of the adolescent's identification with the school, especially for private religiosity. Conclusions. Schools play a key role in the social development of adolescents, and students' religious beliefs and behaviors are influenced systematically and observably by the type of religious climate within the school.     

Gender and the Internet: Causes of Variation in Access,Level, and Scope of Use*

Objective. The article examines differences in the use of the Internet by gender, with a consideration of access to the web, use of communication facilities related to email and chat rooms, frequency of use, and types of websites used. The study considers the impact of socioeconomic status and social, geographic, racial, and ethnic variables for explaining variations in the use of the web by men and women, and how these factors are mediated by knowledge of how to use the web. Methods. The study employs data collected by the General Social Survey (GSS) in 2000, and relates access, communication levels, frequency of use, and types of sites used to gender and other relevant variables. The relevant variables are analyzed by multivariate analysis. Results. Access to the web was independent of gender, but was related to education, race, income, age, and marital status. Women were less likely than men to chat on the web, but were slightly more likely to use email, and they utilized different types of sites than men. Conclusions. Women access the web as frequently as men, but they communicate on the Internet differently than men, are online less than men, and utilize different types of websites than men. Knowledge related to web use is an important independent variable that influences Internet use by men and women.     

Hard to reach and easy to ignore: the drinking careers of young people not in education,employment or training

Young people's drinking in the UK remains a matter of medical, social, media and political concern. The notion of transition and drinking styles in the move from childhood to adulthood and from education to employment has been central to understanding young people's drinking behaviour, but little is known about how the drinking patterns of those not in education or employment, both men and women, develop over time. This paper reports on research which aimed to examine the current drinking habits and drinking careers of young people not in education employment and training who are traditionally described as hard to reach. In‐depth qualitative interviews were undertaken with 23 young people: 15 women and 8 men aged between 14 and 23. The findings are presented with respect to three stages of drinking: starting, continuing or increasing, and decreasing or stopping. The conclusions indicate that for the majority of these young people, alcohol is a significant factor in their lives and that peers, gender, time and place combine to structure both their current alcohol use and drinking career. The paper argues that an understanding of young people's drinking career development and current alcohol use will help target effective social work and multi‐agency intervention.     

What Do You Think? The Relationship between Person Reference and Communication About the Mind in Toddlers

The present studies examined the relationship between children's use of grammatical structures indicating self–other differentiation (i.e., personal pronouns, verb conjugation) and their ability to use language to express their own and others' mental states (MSL). In Study 1, 104 parents of two‐ to three‐year‐old children filled out online checklists assessing children's vocabulary, their use of MSL, and first‐ and second‐person pronouns and verb forms. In Study 2, 77 mothers of 1.5‐ to 2.5‐year‐old children filled out the MacArthur–Bates communicative development inventory, and additional checklists for MSL and verb conjugation. Results of both studies showed that children's use of grammatical person reference is strongly related to their level of grammatical abilities. Importantly, pronominal and inflectional references to others were correlated with children's discourse about the mind. Thus, linguistic tools that are used to distinguish self from others are not only indicators of children's grammatical development, but also their level of sociocognitive understanding.     

Attributing emotions to false beliefs: Development across discrete emotions

Emotion false belief (EFB) is the ability to correctly predict people's emotions given that they hold a false belief (FB). Accumulating evidence suggests that EFB understanding develops after FB understanding; however, the literature presents inconsistencies in this lag. The present study investigated the development of EFB in 85 four‐ and six‐year‐olds, and systematically compared this development to FB understanding across different emotions. Controlling for verbal ability and task demands, 6‐year‐olds scored significantly better on EFB tasks than 4‐year‐olds, and 6‐year‐olds' performance was better than chance. Performance did not vary by emotion. The data supported a developmental precedence of FB to EFB. Results suggest that children's acquisition of EFB is not due solely to verbal ability, FB understanding, or discrete emotion understanding; attributing emotions to beliefs represents a conceptual change in emotion understanding that occurs holistically. These conclusions are discussed in terms of socioemotional development.     

Internet usage of local government employees: A study of the effect of individual preferences,group influences,and administrative factors

Using data from a survey, this study investigates how local government employees use the Internet to carry out their day-by-day work. Our survey reports that most employees use the Internet to download information, communicate, and perform routine tasks. Many of them use the Internet for personal purposes at work. We also test seven hypotheses to explore different variables that may explain the Internet use of government employees. The results show that individual acceptance of the Internet, perceived Internet importance to the work group's mission, and employer-provided training and technical support have a significant impact on their Internet usage at work. This note reports our preliminary findings from a large project to study the role and impacts of information technology in public organizations.     

DISPARITIES IN INTERNET ACCESS: A CASE STUDY OF THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN WESTERN SYDNEY

Research in Australia on the digital divide has concentrated on the disparities that exist between metropolitan and non‐metropolitan areas, and supply side solutions rather than demand side barriers. This paper attempts to add to our understanding of the digital divide in Australia by examining Internet usage in Western Sydney. A survey of over seven hundred households was conducted to analyse disparities in Internet access within a metropolitan area, as well as to add to debates surrounding demand side barriers that inhibit the ability of individuals to access the Internet. The findings suggest that age, income and employment status are significant contributors to demand side barriers. The results confirm evidence from overseas that disparities in online access exist within metropolitan areas. This suggests that more local level information is required so that programs aimed at addressing disparities in Internet access are targeted to the most appropriate areas and individuals, and the circumstances and preferences of those areas and individuals.     

Adolescents with an entity theory of personality are more vigilant to social status and use relational aggression to maintain social status

The present research proposed that one social‐cognitive root of adolescents' willingness to use relational aggression to maintain social status in high school is an entity theory of personality, which is the belief that people's social status‐relevant traits are fixed and cannot change. Aggregated data from three studies (N = 882) showed that first‐year high school adolescents in the United States who endorsed more of an entity theory were more likely to show cognitive and motivational vigilance to social status, in terms of judgments on a novel social categorization task and reports of goals related to demonstrating social status to peers. Those with an entity theory then showed a greater willingness to use relational aggression, as measured by retrospective self‐reports, responses to a hypothetical scenario, and a choice task. Discussion centers on theoretical and translational implications of the model and of the novel measures.