ITR: Understanding the Social Impact of the Internet: A Multifaceted Multidisciplinary Approach

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This project will coordinate several efforts to test competing theories and hypotheses about the Internet's impact on society, including functional equivalence and time displacement, declining social capital, classic innovation diffusion, and reconfigured social networks. This work will be carried out in three ways:1) Enhancing an interactive statistical website at the University of Maryland (www.bsos.umd.edu/webuse) that would make publicly available on-line the latest national data sets (from both the U.S. and other countries), research articles and research findings related to Internet use and its possible impact; 2) Having up to 50 graduate and undergraduate students from across the country participate in a multi-week Summer Webshop in which they discuss with leading research scholars current theories, hypothesis and expectations concerning the Internet; and3) Undertaking new data collections to address controversies or missing variables in existing data sets. The major vehicle for this purpose is the General Social Survey (GSS), which has been monitoring social change for the past 27 years and for which a new Internet module was included in the year 2000 GSS. This project will educate young researchers in studies of Information Technology. It will make available new national data sets for dissertations and other research studies. And it will extend and refine the GSS to include questions on Internet impact and use.