Digital Inclusion Factors among Middle-Class Women in Kerala India

Dr Kim M Thompson Lecturer, School of Information Studies

Charles Sturt University SIS Research Seminar 2015, February 25

Microsoft PowerPoint clipart

Microsoft PowerPoint clipart

http://www.hcicolombo.org/page/display/102/179

http://www.hcicolombo.org/page/display/102/179

2013

Dr Anindita Paul

• Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode

• IT & Systems department

Dr Anindita Paul

• Medium grant research project • “ICT Use by Indian Women” • Everyday life information seeking or small

worlds framework

Ethics approval?

ICT for meeting needs of different user groups, including women, children and other disadvantaged groups.

Identifying factors beyond basic lack of physical access that influence personal attitudes toward ownership and regular use of smart phones, tablets, and laptops.

When a middle class, well educated woman

has technology at her fingertips, what are factors that encourage or discourage use in her everyday life?

Explore issues of access and use that extend beyond poverty and lack of education.

India

• Middle class growing “twice as fast as the overall world population” (World Bank, 2007)

• 3rd highest number of Internet users worldwide

(Internet World Stats, 2014)

India

• 88.07% of India’s Internet users access the Internet with mobile devices (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, 2013)

• 59% of users access the Internet via mobile devices only (Bughin & Manyika, 2012)

• Hotels, restaurants, airports, shops, railway stations with public wifi (Government of India Ministry of Communications & IT, 2009)

India

• Still... – Only 15.1% of the populace is accessing the

Internet (International Telecommunications Union, 2013)

– Only one quarter of this subgroup is female (Intel, 2013)

physical access

social access intellectual access

Burnett, Jaeger, & Thompson, 2008; Thompson & Afzal, 2011; Thompson et al, 2014

Physical access

• Lower-middle income country • Gendered economic inequality (World Economic Forum,

2013)

Intellectual access

• Gendered literacy and labour inequality (Sundaram & Vanneman, 2007)

Social access

• “one in five women in India…believe the Internet is ‘not appropriate’ for them….These women believe engaging online would not be useful for them, and if they did, their families would disapprove” (Intel, 2013, p. 12)

http://www.hcicolombo.org/page/display/102/179

Kerala

• High literacy rate: 93.91% (Government of Kerala, 2011)

– Female 91.98% – Male 96.02%

• High status of women in terms of education and professional positions (Government of Kerala, 2011)

• Women with very recent access to the Internet tend to use it for recreational purposes such as gaming, music listening, and movie downloads, while “women with more than five years of online experience are twice as likely to seek out information on financial services and banking, or related to their source of income, than women who have joined the Internet within the last year.” (Intel, 2013, p. 5)

• Women with very recent access to the Internet tend to use it for recreational purposes such as gaming, music listening, and movie downloads, while “women with more than five years of online experience are twice as likely to seek out information on financial services and banking, or related to their source of income, than women who have joined the Internet within the last year.” (Intel, 2013, p. 5)

Target population

• Physical access – Middle-class; at least 5 years experience with ICT

and the Internet

• Intellectual access – Postgraduate credentials; gainfully employed; high

levels of English proficiency

• Social access – Middle-class, married, nuclear or extended family

“Middle class” in India

• “typically own a television, a refrigerator, a mobile phone and perhaps even a scooter or a car. Although their budgets are stretched, they scrimp and save for their children's education and their own retirement” (Farrell & Beinhocker, 2007)

“Upper middle class” in India

• “tend to be senior government officials, managers of large businesses, professionals and rich farmers. They are highly brand-conscious, buying the latest foreign-made cars and electronic gadgets. They are likely to have air conditioning, and can indulge in an annual vacation, usually somewhere in India”(Farrell & Beinhocker, 2007)

Semi-structured interviews

• Word of mouth and snowball sampling • Face-to-face • 1 hour • Follow up by telephone • Nvivo 10

Research Questions

• How are these women adopting ICT in their daily lives?

• What role does ICT play in the women’s everyday lives?

• Why do these women use ICT?

1. Tell me something

about your family

background? Your

professional

background?

• Introductory questions, family status, education level, literacy and digital literacy information, family make-up

2. What is your schedule

on a typical day? How

much of your time is

spent in professional

tasks and how much

personal?

• Introductory discussion, personal background

3. When was the last

time you remember

you needed some

information, what was

it? How did you go

about finding the

information?

• Probing about information seeking behaviour. Is there ICT use in information seeking process? If not mentioned, probe further with question 4.

4a. If ICT mentioned,

– Do you usually go about

your search needs in the

same order as in this

particular case?

– If yes, can you share

another instance?

– If no, can you describe

another way you use ICT

to seek information?

• Probing about information seeking behaviour and information seeking behaviour using ICT

4b. If ICT not mentioned

spontaneously,

– When do you use ICT, for

what purpose is it used?

• Probing about information seeking behaviour and information seeking behaviour using ICT

5. Which ICT device/s do

you frequently use?

What makes one

device preferable over

another one?

• Factors contributing to the use of ICT

6. What is your impression

of ICT? Do you think of

it has been useful for

your purposes? Is it

comfortable for you to

use ICT? On a scale of 1

to 10, how would you

rate your expertise with

ICT?

• Factors contributing to the use of ICT

7. Can you imagine living

your life without ICT?

What significance does

ICT hold in your life?

• Importance of ICT in daily life and comfort level with ICT

• Multiple ICT devices owned and used (and unused)

• Physical access shortcomings were common worldwide rather than infrastructure or economy-based

• Varying levels of interest and use (as expected)

When a middle class, well educated woman has technology at her fingertips, what are factors that encourage or discourage use

in her everyday life?

Digital literacy factors

• Gained experience through – Gaming – Searching for information about hobbies – Personal needs and entertainment – Helping their children with school assignments – Asking questions of more experienced colleagues – Troubleshooting their own gadgets – Helping their husbands, other family members,

friends

Digital literacy factors

• Training specific to ICT – “I am not at all technology savvy, I am not at all”

(Hiya)

• Independent of actual use – Hiya uses ICT throughout the day for social media

and to help her daughter with schoolwork

• Self-identified rather than objectively assessed – Farha, IT professional, prefers to let her husband

do online searching as she said she thinks he does better searches than her

Professional factors

• The women who used ICT more often in their professional lives were more confident in their digital literacy skills.

Everyday life factors

• Gaming (early use) • Leisure activities and

hobbies • Online shopping and

reviews • News • Finding contacts • Reservations, travel

• GPS • Photography • Online banking • Health information • Recipes • Social media

Social networking factors

• Relationships begun offline maintained through social media

• Women who otherwise felt uninterested in ICT used it regularly for social connective purposes

• Social networks were used to avoid ICT use as well (e.g., gatekeepers, Chatman, 1987; Metoyer-Duran, 1993)

Time factors

• Those who had “a lot of time” used ICT more • Those who had less leisure time used it less,

unless using to help their children or other family members

Privacy and security factors

• Strangers • Information security • Everyone knowing where you are; being

reachable 24/7

So what?

• Digital inclusion is more complex than access to devices and strong internet connections -- it is about fair opportunity.

So what?

• Countries have taken great strides in providing infrastructures for physical access to digital technologies needed for information access and use

• Simple physical access to digital technology does not automatically produce a state of digital inclusion (e.g., Warschauer 2003)

References • Bughin, Jacques and James Manyika. 2012. “Internet Matters: Essays in Digital

Transformation.” [white paper.]. • Burnett, Gary, Paul T. Jaeger, and Kim M. Thompson. 2008. “Normative Behavior

and Information: The Social Aspects of Information Access.” Library & Information Science Research 30 (1): 87-115.

• Chatman, Elfreda A. 1987. “Opinion Leadership, Poverty, and Information Sharing.” RQ 26: 341-53.

• Farrell, Diana and Eric Beinhocker. 2007. “Next Big Spenders: India’s Middle Class.” [white paper.] McKinsey Global Institute.

• Government of India Ministry of Communications & IT. 2009. • Government of Kerala. n.d. Status of Women. • Government of Kerala. 2011. Literacy rate 2011. • Intel. 2013. “Women and the Web.” [white paper.] • International Telecommunication Union. 2013. India Profile. • Internet World Stats. 2014. Top 20 Countries with the Highest Number of Internet

Users. • Jaeger, Paul T., and Gary Burnett. 2011. Information Worlds. New York: Routledge.

• Kharas, Homi and Geoffrey Gertz. 2010. “The New Global Middle Class: A Cross-Over from West to East.” In China’s Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation edited by Cheng Li. Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press.

• Kvale, Steinar. 1996. Interviews: An Introduction to Qualitative Research Interviewing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

• Metoyer-Duran, Cheryl. 1993. “The Information and Referral Process in Culturally Diverse Communities.” RQ 32: 359-71.

• Meyer, Christian, and Nancy Birdsall. 2012. “New Estimates of India’s Middle Class.” [white paper.] Center for Global Development.

• Savolainen, Reijo. 1995. “Everyday Life Information Seeking: Approaching Information Seeking in the Context of ‘Way of Life’.” Library & Information Science Research 17 (3): 259-94.

• Selwyn, Neil. 2006. “Digital Division or Digital Decision? A Study of Non-Users and Low-Users of Computers.” Poetics 34 (4): 273-92.

• Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. 2013. The Indian Telecom Services Performance Indicators.

• Thompson, Kim M., Jaeger, Paul T. Jaeger, Natalie Greene Taylor, Mega Subramaniam, and John Carlo Bertot. 2014. Digital Literacy and Digital Inclusion: Public Policy and the Public Library. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

• Warschauer, Mark. 2003. Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

• World Bank. 2007. Global Economic Prospects: Managing the Next Wave of Globalization. Washington DC: World Bank.

• World Summit on the Information Society. 2003. Declaration of Principles, Building the Information Society: A Global Challenge in the New Millennium.

• World Economic Forum. 2013. The Global Gender Gap Report, 2013. Geneva: Author.