As the role of the Internet has grown, there have been persistent fears that the less wealthy in society would be left out, due to lack of access to hardware, the Internet, or broadband. Although these concerns have lessened as dropping prices and public access programs have increased Internet use across the socioeconomic spectrum, a study in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology suggests that a new divide is becoming apparent: the wealthier and better educated are better equipped to find and evaluate material on the Internet.

The researchers surveyed 160 parents in the Boston area, evenly divided between males and females. Participants were binned into three groups according to their education and income; in all but one minor instance, the results from the middle-income group fell neatly between the high- and low-income subjects. Participants answered surveys regarding their web browsing habits and performed a search for information while narrating their thought process to a watchful research assistant.

A digital divide was apparent in Internet use habits; wealthier individuals accessed the web daily at a rate that was over double that of the lowest income group. The researchers focused on parenting information, where the divide was also apparent: every high socioeconomic status individual had looked for information on children and families, while only 63 percent of the low status group had.

The divide played out in interesting ways when it came to searching for information. Those who searched at Yahoo and MSN were evenly distributed across income groups. Over half the high-income parents, however, used Google, while only 8 percent of low-income parents did—they apparently preferred AOL search. The authors suggested that this difference arose from the fact that high-status parents were over four times more sensitive to search engines returning irrelevant results (the authors consider Google the gold standard for search engines).

Other aspects of the divide extended beyond choice of search engine. 70 percent of high-status parents went back to the original list of search results after hitting an irrelevant site; less than half of low-status parents did the same. They were also twice as likely to tweak search terms when they ran into a set of results they were unhappy with. Finally, those higher up the socioeconomic ladder were more likely (43 percent) to trust information from universities and research organizations than those at the bottom (16 percent).

Given that, in this study population, education and socioeconomic status were linked, one obvious conclusion is that higher education helps individuals develop a skill set that includes the use of the Internet as an information retrieval tool. The authors explicitly call this aspect of the digital divide a "skills deficit," and suggest that training in the basics of successful searching should be made widely available. This is especially important because the users lowest on the socioeconomic scale were the most happy with the information they retrieved, even though their search habits set them up to retrieve less reliable information.

Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 2008. DOI: