Students at Elon College are doing research for the Pew Internet & American Life Project, studying the use of the Internet by area families during a one-week period in January. The class, titled “One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet,” is focusing on 25 families in the Ashley Woods subdivision of the Town of Elon College.
Elon School of Communications faculty member Janna Quitney Anderson is leading the Winter Term class that is involving 25 students in the study. Each student will complete a thorough entry questionnaire with an assigned family, and coach all family members over age 7 on how to fill out a daily Internet-use diary. The students will meet with their family daily for a week to collect completed diary pages. After recording the data, the students will write profiles of the families and their online activities. All the data collected will become part of the Pew Project archives.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center for People and the Press and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Directed by researchers based in Washington, D.C., the project does research aimed at analyzing the social impact of the Internet, exploring its effects on children, families, communities, the workplace, schools, health care and civic/political life. Pew personnel will assist in analyzing the Elon findings and publicizing the study results.
“Our local research is a simple snapshot we hope will offer a revealing glimpse of when and why families use the Internet,” says Anderson. “We want to understand its impact on daily life and family culture.”
The results of the study will be released in late January on a special Web site: www.elon.edu/pew/oneweek. The findings will become part of the Pew reports, which also include studies of such topics as the effects of the Internet on churches, health care, the music industry and elections. To read about the Pew studies, see www.pewinternet.org.
“The Elon project will provide interesting family profiles that will fit nicely with our extensive survey data,” says Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet Project. “For example, we know that 55 percent of Americans have Internet access and 52 percent check e-mail daily. This study will allow us to meet some of those daily Internet users and learn about their attitudes and motivations.”
Families in the study volunteered to become involved in the Elon research. The data-gathering portion of the project will be conducted January 5-12.