2. Key Words: deprived children; children and the internet; digital inclusion; EU Kids Online
Deprived children and their media experience
In contemporary societies, besides the relative social invisibility of children as a social group,
information and research on the most vulnerable groups of children are particularly missing,
namely on children living in poverty or in alternative care, from ethnic minorities or migrant
children, thus being ignored their particular life experiences facing the mainstream reference
of âbeing a childâ. Fewer children but more children in poverty were pointed out by Qvortrup
(1994: xii) as an emerging social trend in European countries at the beginning of the 1990s
that continues to be a reality: one in five children in the EU were at risk of poverty before the
current economic crisis struck â approximately 20 million children, according to Eurostat
(2010).
There are many ways of defining poverty, ranging from absolute or relative definitions based
on income to indicators of social inequality and deprivation. As far as children are concerned,
a move to indicators of child well-being has been recognized as particularly relevant for
measuring their social inclusion (Bradshaw, 2007: 106). Among those indicators is their
material, educational and subjective well-being, already explored in recent UNICEF reports
(UNICEF 2007, 2010). In fact, if children cannot function as "normal" members of society
because they do not have access to the material goods that others deem necessary, then this
indicator of deprivation is a useful one, points Montgomery (2009: 166). Under this
perspective, for European low-income children cyberspace represents ânot a new opportunity
but potentially a new danger, a new form of difference and exclusionâ, as Ridge (2007: 174)
reports: âas childrenâs social lives are increasingly developed, explored and negotiated in the
world of virtual time and space, new sites of social exclusion are emergingâ, namely through
âunsustainable consumption demands of high-tech accessoriesâ.
Even if disadvantaged children gain more internet access, they may remain relatively
disadvantaged both in terms of the quality of internet access they enjoy and because one form
of this disadvantage is generally correlated with others, e.g. parentsâ available time, parental
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3. education and expertise, educational values at home, calm places to studying in and so forth
(Livingstone, 2009).
As noted above, for socially marginalized children and young people, poverty is not only the
scarcity of material or educational resources: it is also an internal construction of a self that
makes certain choices unthinkable, from reading a book from the library in their leisure times
nowadays to considering an ambitious career in their future. As Montgomery (2009: 170)
points out, Bourdieuâs concepts of habitus (considering individual, familiar and societal
dispositions) and social and cultural capitals are here particularly productive, taking the
debate about poverty away from economics and the lack of material possessions and back to
issues of deprivation and inequality, making visible the lack of various forms of cultural and
social capital. On cultural capital one can distinct: institutional cultural capital (such as
academic qualifications), embodied cultural capital (the ways in which people use language,
present themselves, display social competence or confidence and so on) and objectified
cultural capital (their ownership or use of material goods such as books or paintings). The
social capital involves networks and connections and how these networks are sustained.
Based on her ethnographic research among children in the US, Ellen Seiter (2005) argues that,
far from leveling class differences, the internet has deepened social divisions along the lines of
class, race and ethnicity, both within and between countries. Middle-class children are not
only likely to have better quality computers and software; they also are likely to have much
more informed support in using them from parents and other adults, and a greater access to
social networks which will provide them with a sense of motivation and purpose in using such
technology in the first place. By contrast, poorer children simply have less access to cultural
goods and services: âthey live not just in different social worlds, but in different media worlds
as wellâ (Buckingham, 2007: 84).
These different media worlds might be contrasted in the types of access to two levels of digital
divide (Hargittai, 2002): a first level of digital divide means having access to digital
technologies, considering ownership and use; and a second level is related to the user profiles,
assuming that more advanced users will develop a more functional rather than an
entertainment-oriented user profile. The differentiation hypothesis considering that
sociological variables continue to be important predictors including for the digital generation
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4. (Peter and Valkenburg, 2006; Livingstone and Helsper, 2007) also confirms that idea. The
exploration of how far the digital experience of particularly deprived children goes nowadays
is the aim of the current ongoing research. Preceding others that will focus on the second level
of the digital divide, this paper is focused on the first level, also providing a contextualization
of the participant children and youth.
The Portuguese context and the Program Escolhas
Placed in the Southern Europe and facing the Atlantic, living the economic and cultural
globalization from a semi-peripheral situation, a fast expanding consumption and access to
technologies in the last decade, Portugal still experiences an unfinished modernity (Almeida &
Costa, 1998), in-between developed and developing countries, sharing a language and cultural
ties with Brazil, Cap-Verde, Angola and other former colonies, from where come the majority
of migrants.
In the last two decades, the Portuguese society has registered large transformations, namely
in its demographic and structural composition and in lifestyles, both having impacts on
childrenâs and young peopleâs experiences. Demographic and structural changes that have an
impact on childhood are: a decrease in birth rate among native families, one of the most
accentuated in Europe; the increase of recomposed families, which create more complex
parental relations; the differences in the attainment levels of education among generations
(low literate grand-parents; a majority of parents who attained only compulsory school;
adolescents that that have already surpassed their parentsâ schooling); the income gap among
families, with 25% of children living in poverty (INE, 2010).
Being for decades a relatively closed and ethnically homogenous society, Portugal also faces
the consolidation of a broader cultural and ethnical heterogeneity. Besides gipsy families
spread throughout the country, there is an increase of immigrant families, and their second
generations, mostly concentrated in the capital area and in Algarve, and having more children
than the Portuguese ones. Therefore, there is now a bigger diversity of childrenâs social and
cultural backgrounds, as well as different paths and trajectories in their families, both
conditions placing relevant questions on social identities and social inclusion and
participation.
As for the lifestyle changes, it could be mentioned the late arrival to consumption patterns
compared to other contemporary societies, which have had an increasing expression within
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5. the leisure cultures: the changes in the TV panorama (multiplicity of private channels
entertainment-oriented) and in other mass media; an explosion of shopping centres attracting
family outings; the embellishment of the households with individualized technology, amongst
them the digital technologies oriented to entertainment, communication and information Ă la
carte (gaming consoles, DVD players, plasma TV, laptops, digital cameras, mobile phones and
so on). These postmodern scenarios contrast with low levels of informational literacy
amongst adult generations. Among older generations, shared childhood memories of poverty
are combined with the willingness of providing their children with all the material comfort
that they themselves had the lack of. This potpourri of pre-modern, modern and postmodern
structures and values is marked by a high social inequality: amongst the 25 countries that
participated in the EU Kids Online survey, Portugal occupies the second highest position in the
social inequality index (ratio of share of income or expenditure of the richest 10% to the
poorest 10% of the population), after Turkey and followed by the UK.
In recent years, public policies have tried to change the educational scenarios, investing both
in adults and children, around Programs such as Novas Oportunidades [New Opportunities],
targeted at adults with low school attainment, the upgrade of school equipments (e.g.
broadband access, digital boards) and stimulus to the industries to produce and sell low cost
laptops to students since the early years of schooling (Programs MagalhĂŁes and E-Escolas). By
2010, more than 800 thousand families had already answered positively to these Programs,
considered as references for digital inclusion.
Combining social and educational aims, Escolhas is a nationwide program aiming to promote
social inclusion of children and young people (6-24 years old) from the most vulnerable socio-
economic contexts, particularly descendants of immigrants and ethnic minorities. Digital
inclusion is one of its five priority areas of intervention, crosscutting and cumulative with the
others: school education, vocational training, community participation & citizenship, and
entrepreneurship. Its 132 centres are mostly placed in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and
Oporto, created by local NGOs and working in the inner of vulnerable contexts, these being
social housing, old buildings in the city center or slums in the suburbs. Each center is
equipped with a minimum package of six PCs, broadband access and a printer. Digital
activities include guidance, free activities, those aimed at developing skills and school success,
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6. and more formal ICT courses. Local teams are composed by 3-4 technicians and include a
young person living in the community and who acts as mediator.
These centres were the scenario for our interviews with deprived children and young people
(9-16), adapting the EU Kids Online questionnaire. As said, this paper will focus on adaptation
process and on the households and conditions of access the internet among these children,
comparing results with those from the national sample. Let us take a brief look at some of
these national results.
Portugal in the EU Kids Online survey
In Portugal, according to the Eurostat values, children accessing the internet were estimated
to be 78% and thus being the universe of the EU Kids Online survey. On the basis of results on
educational level attained by the main provider and his/her occupation among the thousand
households interviewed, 53% households were composed by low SES families and 18% were
from high SES (European average, respectively, 19 and 34%), a gap that illustrates the social
inequality pointed above. On the internet use at home, about two out of three children were
single users and only 7% declared not having internet access at home.
Only 22 parents out of the thousand interviewed describe their families as belonging to a
group that were discriminated against in the country and only five declared that Portuguese
wasnât the main spoken language at home, suggesting a high level of integration and linguistic
homogeneity among these respondents, due to a possible underestimation of neighborhoods
inhabited mostly by deprived, migrant and ethnic minority children in the national sampling.
National results follow the European pattern on accessing the internet more at home than at
school, but contrast in the devices children use. Portuguese children lead in having a personal
laptop (68%), far from the double of the European average (24%), a probable consequence of
the above mentioned public policies. Children with personal laptops cross all families,
possibly influencing the high presence of the internet in the bedroom (67%; European
average: 49%), occupying the third place after Denmark and Sweden. Differences among SES
are reduced, being the ownership even a little higher among children from low SES families
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7. (68-66%). The reverse is that these children are those with lowest access to the internet in
the public areas of the household (73%; high SES 86%) or through personal PCs (28%;
children from medium SES: 40%), game consoles (22%; high SES: 37%) or mobile devices
(5%; high SES: 10%), and sharing less the computers with others in the household. Influence
of the above mentioned public policies are thus visible, suggesting a clear move from the
âalmost no technologyâ to the personal laptop among children from low SES families.
The low cost of the laptops were supported by internet service providers, integrating different
packages for internet access, the most popular being a pen-drive with a limited amount of
internet traffic. While children of high SES families, where packages of full-access are more
common, declare less access to the internet at schools or in public spaces free of charge,
children from middle and low SES families declare more their use of the internet in those
spaces. In particular, accessing the internet in public libraries was declared by one out of four
children, doubling the European average. However, the daily access to the internet was one of
the lowest among the 25 countries, being also less differentiated by SES (high: 57%; low:
52%) than the European average (respectively 64-49%).
The dynamic process of adapting the EU Kids Online questionnaire
Our initial aim was to compare as far as possible the national results on access, uses, activities,
skills and mediations with those from a purposive sample of children and young people
attending Escolhas centres. Therefore, our first task was selecting 23 questions from the EU
Kids Online face to face questionnaire, following, as much as possible, the protocols and
guidelines for application and interviewing. In this initial phase, we also considered that at
least older children could answer the survey questions by themselves with minimum help. In
order to compensate their effort, , as a symbolic token of appreciation, at the end all the
interviewees received T-shirts and stickers with advice on safety in the internet, provided by
an ISP.
The discussion on the initial draft with Escolhas local coordinators and animators quickly
concluded that even the 14+ yr olds would be unable to answer many questions by
themselves, therefore implying the reduction of sentences to a minimum of information as
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8. well as the number of questions. Abstract terms were replaced by more common words: for
example, [parents, teachers, friends] suggested or explained was replaced by taught.
Issues such as the family composition - potentially sensitive for most children interviewed -
were identified in those local meetings. Since many children did not seem to live in structured
families composed by both parents, the solution was starting the questionnaire by asking the
child: Who do you live with?, and adapting the questions on parental mediation to the adults
which he/she lives with.
The pilot test, conducted with African descendent children (9-14) from one of the most
vulnerable neighborhoods in the Portuguese capital, allowed us to identify other points to be
changed. For instance, the question on the devices for accessing the internet strictly following
the original questionnaire presupposed that the child had his/her own devices or at least that
they existed in the household (Table 1):
Table 1: Devices used for internet access
Yes No No
answer
Your own PC (desktop computer)
Your own laptop or laptop that you mainly use and can take to your own room
A PC shared with other members of your family
A laptop shared with other members of your family and that you cannot take to your own room
A mobile phone
A Games console such as a PlayStation
A Television set (TV)
Other handheld portable devices (e.g. iPod Touch, iPhone or Blackberry)
Source: EU Kids Online survey
This question generated successive negative answers and suggested a sense of material
deprivation. Therefore, a question on media environments at home, used by Livingstone in the
end of the 1990s (Livingstone, 2002), was recuperated (Table 2). Starting with the television
set it allowed children to express pleasure in recalling and counting how many existed in their
households (one⊠two⊠three⊠four!). On the other hand, it also made visible the exchanges as
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9. far as media mobility is concerned: computers, game console, the internet or mobile phones
could be accessed everywhere.
Table 2: Description of the householdâs equipment
At home, for all In your room DonÂŽt have
Television
Radio/Sound System
Game console
Computer
Mobile phone
Internet
Bookshelf with non-school books
Source: Escolhas survey (based on Livingstone, 2002)
The pilot questionnaires also confirmed that particularly young children were tired with its
extension, the difficulties of understanding questions on frequency of uses and apparent
similar questions on mediation. Therefore, more cuts on the information on frequencies were
done. At the end, the questionnaire was divided into two versions, one for the younger (9-13)
and another for the older (14-16).
The version for the 9-13 was designed as a structured interview of 30 questions, some of
them open-ended questions: From this list of activities, what do you prefer? Why?; What are
you forbidden to do on the internet?, and ending with a sensitive question: (And tell me what is
for you using the internet in a safe way? How do you do it?). The version for the 14-16 was a
self-completion questionnaire of 29 questions that included a broader question on cultural
interests and practices as well as three open-ended questions: From this list of activities, which
do you prefer?; What is your blog about?, for those who declared having a blog, and the final
one: We have asked you some questions about good and bad things that can happen on the
internet. Is there anything you would like to warn people of your own age about?
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10. Collecting data
The interviews were conducted between March and May 2011, in 19 Escolhas centres in the
areas of Lisbon and Oporto, where most of them are located, as mentioned before. One or two
researchers visited each centre for an afternoon, previously arranged with mediators which
acted both as âprivileged informantsâ and gatekeepers, so we could find young people in their
free time. This moment was also used to observe children in the place, accessing the internet
by them own, and to catch the environment atmosphere. We had a total of 279 respondents,
distributed as follows:
Table 3: Distribution of respondents per area, gender and age groups
Indicator Frequency %
Area
Lisbon 108 39%
Oporto 171 61%
Gender
Female 96 34%
Male 183 66%
Age
< 14 159 57%
>= 14 120 43%
While age groups are relatively balanced in the sample, gender differences express the reality
of Escolhas: there is much more boys than girls attending the centres. The geographic bias is
due to bigger time-constraints for the field work in Lisbon.
Families, media environments and the first level of the digital divide
Table 4 contrasts results from the EU Kids Online survey and from Escolhas. Although the
different nature of the samplings imposes cautiousness it is interesting to look at the patterns
of differences and similarities that emerge when they are side by side.
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11. Table 4: Results from the EU Kids Online survey and from the Escolhas centres
EU Kids Online Portugal Centros Escolhas
Household composition
Living with one adult 8% 32%
Living with two adults 65% 48%
Living with three adults 21% 5%
Living with 4+ adults 5% 8%
Family type
Single parent 20% 35%
Two parents 79% 54%
Other 1% 9%
Education among parents
Primary education (9 years) or less 47% 92%
Internet access at home
No internet access 7% 31%
At least one parent use the internet 60% 46%
Devices for accessing the internet
Personal laptop 65% 69%
Personal PC 33% 26%
Shared laptop 35% 59%
Shared PC 35%
Game console 25% 13%
Mobile devices 7% 5%
TV 28% 8%
Mobile phone 31% 25%
Places of access
At home 87% 56%
At school 72% 59%
In a public library 25%
In the Digital Inclusion Centre 96%
Frequency of access
Everyday or almost everyday 54% 55%
Once or twice a week 39% 37%
Once or twice a month 4% 6%
Less than once or twice a month 3% 2%
In terms of family background, the results highlight the weight of not structured households
around both parents living together among the interviewees in Escolhas as only 54% lived
with them, contrasting with the 79% among the EU Kids Online national sample. About a
third of children and youth from Escolhas live with a single parent, this being mostly the
mother, and almost one in 10 children is cared for by relatives other than their parents.
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12. Grandparents (especially grandmothers), aunts, uncles and brothers and sisters-in law are
relatives that cohabit with the child and take care of him/her. This picture among deprived
children confirms the sensitivity of the family issues, and the need to avoid the implicit frame
of the two-parentsâ dominant model when asking questions on family mediation.
Educational capital is one of the key sensitive points in Portugal with implications at all levels,
including digital inclusion. Four years of compulsory education reached all children only in
1959-1960, and its extension to 9 years was declared in 1986; school failure and
abandonment during adolescence have also been high for decades. Therefore, nowadays
adolescents might easily have more school attendance than their parents, with the latter
having more than their own parents, frequently illiterate (35% of illiterate people in
1960). Table 4 shows that nationwide, almost half of households still have a parent (usually,
the mother) that didn't reach the Secondary level. Whereas, nowadays young women tend to
have a better performance than young men, among the Escolhas participants the percentage of
parents having the Primary level or less almost reached the total sample size (92%).
A sign of this low cultural and educational capital in their households is the relative high
absence of books: on the side of the print culture for leisure purposes, among the Escolhas
sampling, 38% of the younger respondents (9-13) and 22% of the 14-16 declare not having
non-school books in their households, which makes evident a poor cultural capital in those
families.
Turning to the audiovisual media environment, television is the main device and especially
younger children were proud on counting the sets spread through the households from the
living rooms to the kitchen and bedrooms. The radio/stereo set was the second technology,
being these values in line with the national trend on the media diet among different age
groups in Portugal (Rebelo, 2008).
As far as the digital media is concerned, the first level of digital divide (Hargittai, 2002), the
one on ownership and use, becomes visible. All the interviewed children declared themselves
as internet users but the contexts of access diverge: whereas in the national sampling only 7%
donât have internet access at home, the number of those without this access in the Escolhas
Group is more than four times bigger (31%). The percentage of parents that are internet users
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13. is also below the national average: 46% of these children and youth have at least one member
of the family that know how to use the internet, in particular the mother (46%) or father
(39%), against 60% in the EU Kids Online sampling. This depicts families where children lead
the use of the internet, although using it scarcely.
Following the ownership of personal laptops in European terms, with dominance of low SES
children, as we have seen, this device also leads among the Escolhas children, again above the
national average, whereas all the reminiscent devices (PC, game console, television or mobile
phone) are below the national average. Furthermore, if the ownership of modern technology,
such is the case of laptops, is apparently assured, the comparison on the places of access
shows that children that attend the Digital Inclusion Centres find them real spaces for their
internet access: almost all declare accessing the internet in these public places, while
declaring a lower use of the internet at school and at home. Finally they donÂŽt diverge so
much from the EU Kids Online answers on the frequency of use, this being one of the lowest
values in the European landscape.
When we look at the distribution of these devices by age, the main difference is due to the fact
that children under 14 years tend to refer more often that they neither have most of the
technological devices at home nor the access to internet. Among those 14 yr old or above,
there is a greater expression of ownership of technological devices, particularly in the
bedroom environment. Also, there is a growing importance of the computer that appears
after television and radio as the third device with more relevance in characterizing the
bedroom environment.
Synthesis and next steps
At the end of this glance at the family contexts and digital experiences of those attending the
Digital Inclusion Centers several important methodological remarks need to be made:
Firstly, the importance of considering family compositions and access to the media in the
households that donât fit the mainstream model of middle-class, high educated parents and
well equipped households, thus the importance of avoiding wording questions that might be
insensitive to such contexts. Secondly, the delicate task of adapting the questionnaire to
children that experience low literacy skills, reduced vocabulary and low time spam attention
13
14. to written texts as well as to somewhat complex routing and graphics stressed the advantages
that came from the conversations with local animators from Digital Inclusion centers and the
importance of pre-testing with children from migrant and low income families not being so
familiar with the native Portuguese language. Thirdly, the similarities that emerge between
this sensitive group of less privileged children and the national trend, expressed in the
enthusiasm of the families to adhere to campaigns such as âone laptop per childâ, had two
important consequences: on one hand, at a basic level, made those families move from
exclusion to ownership; on the other hand, it apparently had no outstanding affect on the
amount of use, since this tends to coincide with the relatively low level of frequent internet
access. Fourthly, the high value of informal public spaces with relatively low level of adult
mediation among both groups, such as the public libraries or the Digital Inclusion centres,
suggesting the unexplored potential of these places for other kind of uses and opportunities,
this being particularly relevant when considering the cultural capital and educational level
among the low SES families. Finally the differences between these groups as far as other
digital equipments and household and school environments are concerned, broadening the
gap on opportunities for exploring and using the digital media in different activities and for
the digital literacy.
This research also helps to question the efficacy of public policies of social and digital
inclusion of the most disadvantaged children and young people, as much effort has been put
merely on access, neglecting the interactions of children with the media within the household
and the kind of mediations they receive in different types of families. The availability of public
access does not correspond to an effective use: why is access to the internet in schools less
popular than in the Escolhas Centres by this group? If they have to account for limited time or
limited bandwidth to manage their access to the internet, what are the consequences for
theirs uses? What are the characteristics of their uses if children are the only users of internet
in their homes or if they do not have privacy to use in public spaces such as Escolhas? This will
be the focus of future papers.
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