[Air-l] statscan study

[Barry Wellman]

Folks,

It's bad enough when reporters and blogs comment on press releases, but
I'd hope that participants in the Assoc of Internet RESEARCHERS list would
RTFS itself before posting comments on this list. Not the 1/2 page
newspaper report, and not even the few-page statscan media summary.
Especially as the report is available for free download at www.statscan.ca

Having said that, I'll make the following points (and have made them in 2
media interviewers already:

a) It's not my (or NetLab's) study, but a lead researcher asked me to be
available yesterday for media commentary. (First I heard of the study,
btw, so I had to do some quick reading).

b) correlation NE causality.

c) internet pop is demographically different than non-users (altho study
does use MCA to control for some differences). I would have liked to have
seen an apples-apples comparison: e.g., middle-aged married men with young
kids. THis may explain some of the lesser housework results.

d) Heavy users are defined as TWO (not 1) hours in the past 24 hours.
(i.e., a previous poster got this wrong.)

e) Statscan used standard time-budget / time-use methods, including asking
for primary and secondary activities (i.e., schmoozing with spouse while net
surfing).

f) I agree that there is a tilt towards ignoring the socializing part of
internet use, altho towards the end, the authors do say that the largest
chunk of use is email, IM, chat, etc.

g) But as one reporter (www.globeandmail.com) just asked me, is the nature
of online socializing similar to F2F.

h) There may be a Zen half-full / half-empty effect. For example, heavy
users do an adjusted 33 minutes less of housework and somewhat less HH
socializing. OTOH, our Connected Lives paper shows that "only" 36% of the
folks we studied have any stress about their spousal unit being online too
much (and most of this that stress is minor). So is it the similarity or
the difference that should be emphasized. I expect Tracy Kennedy will use
CL data to delve into this more in the next year.

But please RTFS before commenting. This ain't a research-free blog.

 Barry
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  Barry Wellman         Professor of Sociology        NetLab Director
  wellman at chass.utoronto.ca  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman

  Centre for Urban & Community Studies          University of Toronto
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