Barjäärid Interneti kasutajaks hakkamisel 45−60-aastaste meeste näitel

Kuupäev

2007

Ajakirja pealkiri

Ajakirja ISSN

Köite pealkiri

Kirjastaja

Tartu Ülikool

Abstrakt

Kirjeldus

In this survey I was looking for the reasons why certain group of mid-aged men in Estonia (in age 45−60 years) are not using Internet or barely using it. In 2002, Estonian Informatics Centre performed a survey called „Digital Divide and The Possibilities to Overcome it in Estonia” (EMOR, PRAXIS 2002) and it showed that one of the biggest group of non-users (27% of the non-users) is amongst mid-aged men that have lower education and income. In order to get detailed info and attitude from the target group I used in-depth interviews as an information gathering method and later analyzed performed interviews using qualitative data analysis of the text. Target group consisted of 8 men in age of 45 to 58 years of which three were frequent users, three were light users and two were non-users. Each respondent was put to specific group by his Internet usage characteristics. In qualitative data anlysis I encoded the data to the topics and picked the quotes of each respondents answers regarding the topic, then interpreting those quotes. Based on gathered info I made tables with general keywords from the interviewee to give a compact overwview of the results. At the beginning of the survey I formulated three main questions to which the results of the study should have give the answers: 1. Why are todays non- or random users what they are? 2. What are the possibilities of transforming them to users? 3. What was the main reason todays users became users? Based on the analysis of the previous studies regarding the subject I also formulated four hypothesises: 1. Thanks to the development of the general economics of Estonia, fast development of the infotechnological sector and the rapidly growing number of Internet users, the access barrier is gone. 2. As access barrier is no longer present, the biggest obstacle is the lack of everlasting will and habit to learn. This habit (or lack of it) is of deeply sociological origin and hard to overcome. 3. Very important obstacle is language barrier: when user is not fluent in English/Estonian, he/she has only limited access to Internet resources. 4. Internet access is more important to people who live outside the cities, because the could benefit more from the services Internet provides. Analysis of the interviews showed that todays non- or random users are such because the lack or poor quality of Internet access. That argument is not valid in the cities though but is furthemore important in areas outside of the cities. Estonian government is in the middle of projects called Külatee that should give Internet access to these areas, though so far the developments are not satisfying for countryside people. They complain about the lack of, poor quality or non-affordable price of the Internet service. Access barrier proved to be the most important of the obstacles at all and neither of the other two main obstacles (habit to learn in older age and language barrier) proved so important. But, these barriers were mentioned in interviews. Internet access is more important to countryside people than people in cities and data analysis showed strongly that this point is valid. Mostly because of the straight benefit of keeping the costs lower and save time. This study revealed that it is important to focus the attention to non-users group as there are very few surveys done in Estonia in that matter.

Märksõnad

H Social Sciences (General)

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