RESEARCH: Influence of Children on Technology Transmission

SANTIAGO, Chile. Wiley Online Library. January 29, 2014. (English), by Teresa Correa. –Bottom-up technology transmission is more prominent amongst women and people with lower socioeconomic situations, as well as with less authoritarian parents, according to research published in the Journal of Communication. Overall, results suggest that children taught their parents about all technologies investigated, however, their influence should not be inflated.

This study investigated the bottom-up technology transmission process in a country with varied levels of technology diffusion, such as Chile. It explored to what extent children teach their parents how to use digital media and proposed a typology of factors related to this process. By relying on a mixed-methods design — which combined interviews with an original survey — and dyadic data, it found that the transmission occurs for all the technologies investigated, although children’s influence should not be overstated. This process was more likely to occur among women and people from lower socioeconomic status, and it was also associated with less authoritarian parents and more fluid parent–child interactions.

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