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

该项目将协调多项工作，以测试关于互联网对社会的影响的相互竞争的理论和假设，包括功能等价性和时间移位、社会资本下降、经典创新扩散和重新配置的社会网络。这项工作将通过三种方式进行：1)加强马里兰大学的交互式统计网站(www.bsos.umd.edu/webuse)，使公众可以在线获取与互联网使用及其可能的影响有关的最新国家数据集、研究文章和研究结果；2)让来自全国各地的50名研究生和本科生参加为期数周的夏季网上研讨会，在此期间，他们与领先的研究学者讨论有关互联网的当前理论、假设和预期；以及3)进行新的数据收集，以解决现有数据集中存在争议或缺少变量的问题。为此目的的主要工具是社会总调查，它在过去27年里一直在监测社会变化，2000年社会总调查纳入了一个新的因特网模块。这个项目将教育年轻的研究人员学习信息技术。它将为学位论文和其他研究提供新的国家数据集。它还将扩展和完善GSS，以包括有关互联网影响和使用的问题。

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.