People who identified health matters or education matters showed more concern in using libraries than people who had other matters. The internet has opened worlds of information to Americans, but going online to search for it can carry a risk of unintentionally disclosing personal, sensitive and even embarrassing personal information. About one in five of […]
Introduction and Demographics More than half of all respondents, 56%, who said they faced a problem in the past two years identified one of three matters: health care, paying for health care and government benefits such as Social Security and military pensions. Parsing that further, the responses from Americans who have high access and low […]
Introduction Overall, Americans overwhelmingly report that they were successful at finding the information or assistance they needed to deal with a particular problem. Three in five, 60%, report they were very successful and 29% report they were somewhat successful. Self-reporting on success varied according to income and degree of internet access. Higher income means higher […]
Introduction A deeper understanding of teens’ writing habits—both inside and outside of the school environment—is crucial for developing successful programs to improve writing skills and achievement. Today’s teens engage in significant amounts of writing, particularly in scholastic settings. All teens say they write for school (half doing so just about every day), and most do […]
Introduction At this time in internet history, e-government is evolving to offer information, help, and efficiencies of all sorts to citizens. Measuring citizen participation in e-government and evaluating its success and shortcomings so far can help point the way toward improved online services and to a more satisfied, and therefore involved, engaged citizenry. This research […]
Introduction Americans deal with a broad array of problems in their lives, from health care to education to employment to retirement. Many of these are personal matters having little or no relationship to the government. Others are personal matters that require dealing directly with the government, such as obtaining a military pension, Social Security benefits […]
Introduction Fully 93% of teens use the internet, and teen use of the internet has intensified in recent years. In 2006, 89% of teens accessed the internet from home. This is fairly consistent with our survey data from 2000 and 2004, which showed that a similar percentage of teens accessing the internet from home. Home […]
Any research undertaking in the social sciences must confront the following questions: What is the evidence on which you base your conclusions? How reliable is that evidence? These questions permeated the papers and discussions at the workshop. As has been noted, speakers and participants concluded that the existing datasets all have limitations that inhibit their […]