Reconsidering the within-Country Digital Divide and the Global Digital Gap: Comparing Students' Daily Life Experiences with Information and Communication Technologies from 40 Countries

The rapid development in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has drawn scholars’ attention to a new social problem—the digital divide.  However, there has been little work examining the link between national contexts and students’ experiences with ICTs.  This research combines two groups of literature: micro-level accounts on the inequality of digital usage and macro-level studies centering on the global digital gap.  Using data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009 data, I utilize hierarchical linear modeling to examine how institutional variables at the country-level are associated with students’ digital usage across 40 countries.  I use Cook’s distance to diagnose the influence of data points from the cluster level.  Three institutional factors are examined: economic development, income inequality, and educational expenditure.  Results are twofold: (1) The digital divide between socially-advantaged versus socially-disadvantaged students is wider for countries with lower income, higher inequality, and lower educational expenditure.  (2) The effects of institutional characteristics on digital usage only matter for low SES students, but not for their high SES counterparts.  This research helps scholars identify key national characteristics that influence the inequality of digital usage.