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Web Survey Bibliography

Title Is the digital divide still closing? New evidence points to skewed online results absent non-Internet households
Year 2008
Access date 11.09.2013
Abstract

In 2002, a Department of Commerce report titled, A nation online: How Americans are expanding their use of the Internet,1 sparked a discussion around the differences between Internet and non-Internet households – the digital divide. Recently, the debate has shifted to the broadband digital divide, which shows similar findings. Now that the number of non-Internet households seems to have stabilized, we need to consider the ongoing impact of Internet penetration in the U.S. with regard to online research. Looking at figure 1, we notice a rapid trend in Internet adoption up to 2001, then a slowdown and consolidation to 64% by Spring 2008. Data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project2 shows the same type of trend in Internet penetration, with the main difference being that Pew measures Internet adoption at a 'person' level, counting users who go online at least occasionally.

From these two sources of data, we can see how non-Internet households are not going to disappear anytime soon. Therefore we want to re-assess the contribution of non-Internet households to the final estimate of survey statistics, and whether we can afford to 'forget about' them.

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Year of publication2008
Bibliographic typeReports, seminars
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Web survey bibliography - Callegaro, M. (41)