Digital inequality in physical and skills access among European adolescents

Abstract

This chapter investigates whether adolescents coming from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds lag behind their more socio-economically advantaged peers with respect to physical and skills access to computers and the Internet. The chapter's empirical basis is that of information on ICTs possession and skills collected in the framework of the 2009 wave of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) of 15 year-olds for 28 European Union Member States and countries in one way or another associated with the EU. Logistic multilevel regression and linear multilevel regression are used as the methods of analysis. The results of the analysis reported in this chapter allow concluding that while in the case of skills access the potential sources of social exclusion and marginalization - defined here following the EU's official policy documents dealing with the problem of digital inclusion - have substantively small negative effects on the respondent's score on the index of digital skills, as far as physical access is concerned, the very same potential sources of social exclusion and marginalization still substantively determine the respondent's odds of having the Internet access at home.