Telephones, TV and the Internet: The Impact Information Technology in the Home Has on Social Involvement and Psychological Well-Being

这项研究考察了家用计算机和互联网如何改变美国家庭的社会和心理福祉，并将这些新技术对家庭的影响与电话和电视等旧技术的影响进行了比较。研究的目的是(1)确定早期研究结果表明互联网的使用是否会降低心理幸福感和社会幸福感在样本、互联网服务和时间上的普遍程度；(2)确定这些影响的机制；(3)比较不同的家庭信息技术使用模式的影响。数据将来自一项全国性的三波小组调查，这将使一个人能够检查人们一次使用电视、电话、计算机和互联网的数量如何预测他们在随后的社会参与和心理健康方面的未来变化。这项调查还将进行一项准实验，在调查中，部分有电脑但没有互联网接入的受访者将随机分配免费互联网接入，而不是现金支付。结果将对正在出现的关于普遍使用互联网的政策辩论和对社会负责的互联网服务的设计产生影响。

This research examines how household computing and theInternet are changing the social and psychological well being of theAmerican family, and compares the influence of these new technologieson households with that of older ones--telephones andtelevisions. The research objectives are (1) to determine whether theearly results showing that use of the Internet decreases psychologicaland social well being generalizes across samples, Internet services, andtime, (2) to identify mechanism for these effects, and (3) to comparethe impact of different patterns of household information technologyuse. Data will come from a national three-wave, panel survey, allowing oneto examine how the amount of television, telephone, computing, andInternet people use at one time predict later changes in their socialinvolvement and psychological well being at a subsequent time. Thesurvey will be supplemented with a quasi-experiment, in which a subsampleof respondents who have computers but no Internet access will berandomly assigned free Internet access instead of a cash payments toparticipate in the survey. Results will have implications both foremerging policy debate about universal access to the Internet and forthe design of socially responsible Internet services.