Visit the new Web site for the "One Neighborhood, One Week on the Internet" study, a joint project of Elon and the Pew Internet Project. Details...
Click here to visit the site.
It contains 50 interesting feature stories illustrating how Elon students and families in the Town of Elon are using the Internet. Find out how they feel about the impact of the Internet on their lives and on society.
Students at Elon have completed a research project detailing how families in one typical upper-middle-class American neighborhood used the Internet during the week of Jan. 12-19.
The research is a partnership by the Elon School of Communications and the Pew Internet & American Life project, a Washington D.C.-based initiative that is exploring the Internet’s impact on American society. The two dozen families taking part in the study all live in a small, upscale neighborhood in the town of Elon College.
Most of the Internet users who participated in the project say going online has transformed their lives, providing crucial health information, facilitating job searches, transforming shopping habits, and most importantly, increasing communication between family and friends through e-mail and instant messaging.
This study is the first ever to combine Internet users’ personal observations in addition to in-depth interviews over a span of eight days. Each member of the 24 families in the study kept a daily diary of Internet use and participated in taped, focused discussions with the researchers.
The student researchers gathered data from assigned families, wrote feature stories about those families and also wrote personal stories about the impact the Internet has had on their own families’ lives, providing the perspective of the emerging generation of Net-savvy users.
Now that the information gathering in the neighborhood is complete, researchers from the Pew Internet Project will assist in analyzing the Elon findings and publicizing the study results.
The Pew Internet & American Life Project is a non-profit initiative of the Pew Research Center for The People and the Press and is funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Over the course of the past year, the project has produced reports on the Internet’s influence on the workplace, young voters, churches, health care, the music industry, coverage of the Olympics and several other topics. Project findings can be found online at the Pew site.