‘Digital Good’ and Vulnerable People’s Digital Inclusion: Key Findings from Testing a Social Lab Framework.

In this paper, we present findings from a pilot study exploring what ‘digital good’ looks like from the perspective of vulnerable people in relation to their digital inclusion and associated socio-digital inequalities. The study adopted a social lab framework (Tsatsou & Polizzi, under review) to explore the concept of the ‘digital good’ and to test whether such a framework is effective in generating insights into the relationship between ‘digital good’ and the digital inclusion of three vulnerable groups - ethnic minorities, older people and people with disabilities. Methodologically, the study was informed by Participatory Action Research (PAR), which is often championed for generating social change (Abma et al., 2017; Penfield et al., 2014), and it adopted a decolonising research approach (Thambinathan and Kinsella 2021), thus addressing three questions:

1. In what ways, if any, do vulnerable people’s perceptions and experiences of ‘digital good’ (re)shape their digital inclusion and associated inequalities in the digital and broader social realm?
2. What initial conclusions can we reach about individual agency and resistance as part of how ‘digital good’ is perceived and experienced by vulnerable people in relation to their digital and broader social inclusion?
3. How effective is the proposed social lab framework in enabling research to explore how ‘digital good’ speaks to vulnerable people’s digital inclusion and associated socio-digital inequalities?

Cited References

Abma, T.A. et al. (2017).“Social Impact of Participatory Health Research: Collaborative Non-Linear Processes of Knowledge Mobilization. Educational Action Research 25(4): 489–505.

Penfield, T. et al. (2014).“Assessment, Evaluations, and Definitions of Research Impact: A Review.” Research Evaluation 23(1): 21–32.

Thambinathan, V., & Kinsella, E. A. (2021) Decolonizing methodologies in qualitative research: Creating spaces for transformative praxis. International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 20.

Tsatsou, P., & Polizzi, G. (under review). Decolonial research of vulnerable people’s digital inclusion: A social lab framework. Submitted to Communication Research.