Worthless Research

Since I will not be in class on Thursday to give my thoughts and reflections on the reading assigned for this week, I decided to present my findings in my blog. So, to recap the study:

Purpose:
This study examines the extent and causes of digital inequality, or differences in IT access and use, between natives and immigrants in the United States, with a particular focus on the role of English Language Skills.

Data:
Data was collected from the Current Population Survey and the 2000 U.S. Census. 402,778 observations were made from the CPS. The data collected from this survey was used to indicate computer use and ownership. Because the CPS does not adequately cover the variable, on English Speaking ability. For this reason, the researchers attempted to combine data from the US census with data from the CPS.

Results:
The results indicate that immigrants are substantially less likely than natives to use IT for every measure of IT that was examined.

Individuals living in Spanish-speaking households are generally much less likely to live in a household that owns a computer and to use IT.

Other interesting things pointed out in the article:
“Our consistent finding that immigrants are less likely to use IT than natives is in striking contrast to results for Australia reported by Chiswick and Miller (2005). They find that immigrants there are more likely than comparable natives to use computers.”

“Immigrant households tend to be poorer and less educated than households headed by a U.S. native.”

“The vast majority of Internet sites are in English, with 68 percent of the web pages in English and only 3 percent in Spanish in 2000.”

My thoughts and conclusions:
I don’t know the person who conducted the study, but it seems to me like this is a case of “REALLY?? Wow… who didn’t know that?”

Let’s see… people that immigrate to the US (and the concern was with Latin Americans) tend to have less money than people already in the US. Therefore they don’t have the money to purchase and use technology. If they didn’t use it in their native country, why would they start using it in the US?

Of course if the majority of the webpage’s on the Internet are in English, use of the internet is going to be tied to your ability to speak English.

I’m going to design a study… I’m going to show that there must not be a problem with immigrant using IT… see, I am going to a country that doesn’t speak English and I am going to interview people that immigrated there from the US in the last 5 years and find out what percentage of them have access to and use computers. I bet my findings will be more in line with the study in Australia than the one done in the US.

I guess part of the reason this seems to be such a waste to me is that I understand that computers belong to a younger generation. Use of a computer implies extra money and free leisure time. An immigrant to the United States from another country will not typically have extra money or leisure time. They will also be older (since the CPS concentrated only on people aged 18+) and will be less likely to have grown up in their own culture using computers.

So my problem would be to figure out how we convince people that if they want to be part of the American culture part of which is this large adoption of technology that one of the things they have to do is learn how to speak English. I’m not going to go over to Russia and complain that I can’t use Russian technology because all the instructions are written in… Russian!

The study from Australia used “comparable natives”… so if the study really wanted to prove something, it should have compared immigrants to natives within the same socio-economic status.

But that’s beside the point. The purpose of this paper was to show that the ability to speak English influenced immigrants usage of technologies that the primary language for is English… DUH! If I can’t read what I am using, I can’t really use it, can I?