Conclusion

After spending time reviewing and analyzing the data I have come to the conclusion that education does correlated with frequent (multiple times per day) home internet use (disregarding college students who are most likely digital natives).  This shows that there is still a level of digital divide in our society, and that it is education based.  It should be noted that in 2000 only 34% of High School grads, 63% of people with some college, and 75% of people with a college degree or higher had access to the internet.  This has dramatically increased over the past 13 years according to my data, at least in home internet access.  Everyone in my refined data set had access to the internet at home, and everyone in the original data had access to the internet at home except for one person (who could have just left it blank by mistake).  I have also come to the conclusion that there is a similar correlation of internet use at work based on education level, although there is the possibility of data entry error here.  I am concerned that people would often check “Never” when they meant to not check anything at all.  This fear is even more prevalent in internet use at school as many of the older respondents went to school when the internet did not exist (or at least in a form similar to what it is now).  I could have removed the “Never” section and made a graph of frequency of internet use of people who use the internet.  However, if I had done that I would have run the risk of having a small sample size.

My other conclusion is that there is still a gap between race and internet use at home.  Looking at the study from 2000 (Lenhart, 2000), everyone (white, black, and hispanic/latino) has become more connected in the past 13 years.  This gap is not in overall use, but in frequency of use.  From my results I found that black people were 100% likely to use the internet multiple times per day at home, but they had a sample size of 5 so I would not (and you should not) conclusions from such a small amount of data.  The mixed race sample sizes were also under 10, so I cannot accurately draw conclusions for them either.  White, Latino/Hispanic, and Asian people had large sample sizes, so data regarding them is more accurate.  I found that Asian people are very likely to use the internet multiple times per day (95%), as are white people (89)%.  Hispanic/Latino people are only 60% likely to use the internet multiple times per day at home.  This means that connected White/European Americans have increased by 39%, where as connected Hispanic/Latino people have only increased by 16%.  There is obviously some growth gap present.  I don’t want to draw any conclusions about work and school due to the ratios of education levels and race levels for some groups.

Reflecting on this project, I have learned that the key to any research project is a very large data set.  I could not draw as many conclusions as I had hoped since the majority of data were college students and White or European Americans.  It would have been better if we had set out to survey the same number of each race/ethnicity and each education level, or at least set a minimum number of people for each category of people.  It would be even better if we had set out to find a set minimum number of people each race/ethnicity and education (IE: black college graduates, white high school/GED).  I would have been able to draw conclusions for more categories of people if we had.  I have also found that questions on surveys need to be labelled as clearly as possible because I believe that portions of my data are inaccurate.  More specifically, we should have added a selection called “N/A” or “The internet did not exist when I was at home/work/school” to Question 3 (the one about internet use).  With that one change to the survey my data would have been much more accurate.  I now know the pain of statisticians and sociologists.

If you would like to view all of the data in an Excel form, download it here.  Chart 3.0 contains my most refined data.