Seven days, two dozen families in a quiet little town: Interviews and diaries illuminate societal effects of new medium
This is a revealing ethnographic study of Internet use during the week of Jan. 12-19, 2001, by 24 upper-middle-class families in a small-town neighborhood in the United States. The information here was gathered through interviews and the completion of time-use diaries by individual family members in two dozen Elon, N.C., households. Entry and exit interviews and the family members’ daily diary entries have been woven into the highly-detailed magazine feature-style stories on each family you will find on this site. Each of the student researchers, ages 19 to 21, also wrote in detail about their own personal Internet use. And the statistical breakdown of the details in the families’ diaries is also included on this site.
- The families’ personal stories
- The diaries – stats record a typical week of Internet use in January 2001
- The researchers’ personal stories
- Background on the small town that hosted the study
The Study Team
The “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet” study was created and carried out by 25 students of the Elon University School of Communications, led by their professor, Janna Quitney Anderson, in the Ashley Woods neighborhood of Elon during the winter term of 2001. The study was partially funded by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. It donated a small honorarium to be given to each family that agreed to keep a daily Internet-use diary and meet regularly with a researcher from Elon to discuss their uses of the Internet during the week of the study. This study was funded in the early days of Pew Internet, for which founding director Lee Rainie was tasked to explore the growing impact of the Internet on American society.
Methodology and Results
This study, the first ever to document Internet users’ personally recorded observations, took place over a total of eight days. One upper-middle-class neighborhood in Elon, Ashley Woods, was selected for recruiting participants due to the likelihood that families there could afford and would have home computers and Internet connections. Two student researchers went door-to-door in the neighborhood late in the Fall of 2000, seeking people willing to complete the diaries and interviews.
In January 2001, all of the students in an Elon University course specifically built to do this work spent half of the course training in ethnographic research methods and research/feature writing. Each was assigned a family to meet and work with during the week of the study. The recruited participating families took part in long, focused entry and exit discussions that were recorded. These were sandwiched around a solid seven days of time-use diary keeping.
The student researchers explained the purpose of the study and taught families how to keep the diaries. They gathered the daily diary data from assigned families, they recorded in-person interviews on tape, wrote feature stories about the families uses of the Internet and also wrote their own personal accounts, explaining their uses of the Internet and the impact the Internet has had on their own families’ lives, providing the perspective of the emerging generation of Net-savvy users.
Most of the Internet users who participated in the project said going online transformed their lives in some way: providing crucial health information; facilitating vacation planning, job searches and house hunting; transforming shopping habits; changing the way they operate in the workplace; sharing laughs and playing games, and – most often mentioned as most important – increasing communication with family and friends through e-mail and instant messaging.
E-mail is just now replacing letter writing for many of the people in this study. They said that because it is convenient and quick they are communicating much more often with far-flung friends and relatives than they did when limited to using the U.S. Postal Service to deliver handwritten letters. Many of these Internet users said they have gained newly renewed ties or closer ties with friends and relatives, many of whom live hundreds to thousands of miles away or in foreign lands.
Most of the people in this study said the Internet is an empowering, freeing information utility. They appreciate that it allows them to communicate at their convenience and do astounding amounts of research in various areas of interest – including a vast supply of potentially life-saving or life-altering medical information.
Statistical data gathered from Time-Use Diaries can be found here.
The richest content is found in the feature stories in which the families and researchers’ share of their personal experiences
Read some or all of the 50 ethnographic storytelling pieces and discover many anecdotes involving the Net and its impact:
The Ashley Woods families’ stories
The ethnographic researchers’ personal stories
- People with family members facing cancer, fibromyalgia, celiac disease and febrile seizures who used the Internet to research medical facts and communicate with others who face the same conditions.
- People who planned and/or booked complete vacation packages to Disney World, Nashville, Washington, D.C., and Hawaii using Web travel sites.
- Several family members who were able to locate long-lost friends or relatives using Web people searches, and many who have done genealogy research online.
- Several families who have located and/or purchased specialized products and services, such as new and used cars, antique tools, topiary design, digital sound editing equipment, beef jerky and particular styles of carpeting and drapery fabric. One family even located a product liability lawyer to consult about an accident.
- Youngsters who gather all the information, graphics and photos they need to complete school projects for elementary and middle school.
- Several families who conduct daily communication with friends and relatives who live around the world, and some who have weekly instant messenger meeting times during which far-flung family members regularly get together online to have chat sessions.