I looked very briefly at this point in a paper I gave at a conference the
other day. I've copied and pasted the relevant bit...not relating just to
the UK though.
'Surveys consistently show that Internet users are more likely to be white,
male, first world residents, relatively affluent and relatively well
educated in comparison to any more general population.'
My main reference for it was:
Coomber, R., Using the Internet for Survey Research. Sociological Research
Online, 1997. 2(2)
...which I know is elderly but the same seems still to apply, if to a lesser
extent. Sorry I don't have any actual figures. Maybe if you put that Coomber
reference into Google Scholar and did a citation search you might turn
something up?
Best wishes,
Margo
-----Original Message-----
From: The Disability-Research Discussion List
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Larry Arnold
Sent: 28 November 2007 19:06
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Ethnic and socio economic make up of internet users
Ok Ok so I ought to be enquiring about gender and the social construct of
disability too ...
But does anyone know of any research (the more recent the better because
these things are in
constant shift) into the socio economic and ethnic breakdown of people who
have regular access to
the internet in the UK.
I suppose that there are different subsets of users in that specific
interests mailing lists, might
have a very different skew to the whole population, as might indeed facebook
and myspace vary from
each other.
I would suppose it would be somewhat unethical to use ones own mailing lists
as a sample trawl.
However being as so much research these days uses the short cut and
convenience (not to say the
laziness) of using the internet to gather suspects - sorry Freudian slip, I
meant subjects :) it
would be interesting indeed somewhat essential to know what dangers of bias
this is leading to, in
order to develop protocols to rectify that in ones own cheap and lazy
research (do you think I am
made of money with research grants coming out of my metaphorical ears?)
Larry
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