Broadband Adoption, a National... meh, whatever

[Commentary] Complex questions about relevance or, for that matter, the ranking of government priorities, lend themselves poorly to phone survey methods. The question of the 'relevance' of the Internet is, frankly, a weird one that lies outside most people's daily experience with the Internet.

In the Pew survey, relevance is a composite of several other reasons for non-adoption, including 'not interested,' 'too busy' and 'don't need it.' Such reductionism is fine except that informants may also be engaged in reductionism or substitution in their answers. Our work, which was based entirely on interviews and focus groups, often ran up against an initial rejection among non-adopters of the Internet's 'relevance' to their lives, only to find those views revised or elaborated as informants reflected on the question and on their wider set of information habits and needs. We routinely found that people who expressed disinterest in a first instance would later signal difficulty or discomfort with Internet or computer use as a major reason for non-adoption. Pew separates these categories, leading to a finding that only 1 in 10 non-users are interested in adopting but 6 of 10 need support or training. Other slippage between terms was relatively common. These effects are magnified, we would argue, in poor or otherwise marginalized communities. The poor tend to be underrepresented in phone surveys for a variety of reasons, including concrete barriers such as lower rates of landline service or English fluency; and softer barriers such as socio-economic or cultural distance from the imagined average respondent for whom the surveys are designed. Issues of trust are also important in these contexts and shape respondents' answers (for this reason we relied on community-based intermediaries to arrange meetings and interviews). The government, in particular, is often regarded with suspicion when it begins to ask questions about people's home lives. And finally, many of the 'essential service,' questions involving education or health, touch on areas that some informants consider private. These issues take time and care to unpack.

So while the Pew study isn't wrong, strictly speaking, we would argue that it is the wrong instrument to get at many of the more complex issues it chooses to explore in this space. Unfortunately, the results are easily used to take a swipe at an important new initiative. For our part, we stand by Finding #1 in our report: Broadband Access is a Prerequisite of Social and Economic Inclusion (and Low-Income Communities Know It). We're glad that the FCC knows it.