Reference: Girouard-Hallam, L. N., Tong, Y., Wang, F., & Danovitch, J. H. (2023). What can the internet do?: Chinese and American children’s attitudes and beliefs about the internet. Cognitive Development, 66, 101338.

---

During the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, over 90% of children in America and China attended school online. Children were using the internet for learning in record numbers, and though most children have returned to in-person instruction, their exposure to the internet is still incredibly high. The internet serves a wide variety of useful purposes: it informs, entertains, and provides access to new social communities. Even very young kids continue to engage with the internet in high numbers, so it’s important to explore what they think about it.

One way to get insights into what children think about the internet is to ask them directly. This meant that I needed to design a study that was a little different from the way I normally conduct my science experiments. Usually, I’m interested in experimental manipulation; I create scenarios for children to respond to, and I change certain elements of those scenarios to see if children’s responses also change as a result. Instead, my most recent scholarly article is about creating a measure. I used a survey to ask children about their internet-related attitudes and beliefs, and then used statistics to see whether their responses to certain questions in the survey were related to one another. This process involved two main components:

1. Designing and disseminating a survey.
2. Creating and confirming a model that represents how children responded across multiple groups.

After I had done this, I was able to use my survey to explore different things that might impact children’s beliefs about the internet. In particular, I used the demographic information that I had about my participants to see if those differences between children (often called individual differences) changed the way they thought about the internet.

Designing and Disseminating the Survey

The first task for this paper was to think about what kinds of questions we, the research team, had about kids and the internet. We decided that we were particularly interested in what kinds of things kids use the internet for, so we created a six-item survey about internet experience. This included two items that were about whether children had observed a parent or teacher using the internet. We knew that we wanted to ask these questions of children in early elementary school, so we appreciated that children might have different literacy abilities. By asking questions about other adults in the child’s life, we could gain insight into their broader experiences with the internet, even if they weren’t able to read and write well enough to interact with the internet themselves.

Experience Survey Questions

Have you ever used the internet for a video call?

Have you ever used the internet to look up the answer to a question?

Have you ever used the internet to play a game or watch a video?

Have you ever used the internet to learn how to do something?

Have adults you know ever used the internet to show you something?

Have adults you know ever used the internet to look up the answer to a question that you had?

We also used journal articles that had previously been written about children and the internet to inform the kinds of questions that we wanted to ask. Previous research has investigated whether children trust information that they are told comes from the internet, and whether children can interact with the internet in ways that help them learn. These are important questions to answer, and knowing whether children think that the information on the internet is accurate, what kinds of information children think the internet can provide, and how comfortable children are using the internet independently can help to provide important context to these research questions. Therefore, we ended up with thirteen items about children’s attitudes towards the internet. We designed these items as statements that children could agree or disagree with on a four-point scale.

Attitudes Survey Statements

I like using the internet to look for information.

When I am at home, I am allowed to use the internet on my own.

I need help from an adult to use the internet.

I know how to find information using the internet.

The internet can give you information about things that are happening in the world right now.

The internet can give you information about things that happened a long time ago.

The internet can give you information about science.

Using the internet is an important skill.

Most of the information on the internet is true.

The internet has more correct than incorrect information.

Most of the information on the internet is wrong.

I would rather use books than the internet to find information.

There’s more information on the internet than in any library on Earth.

We also had to think about what kinds of kids we wanted to answer these questions. Because we asked about using the internet, it was important to us to make sure that kids were largely able to do so on their own, so we set our minimum age to 6. We also wanted to capture changes that might occur in children’s attitudes about the internet as they grew older, so we once again turned to previous literature about children and the internet to read about when children become more independent online and set our maximum age to 10 to reflect this.

In the end, we gave this survey to over 800 children between the ages of 6 and 10 from Fall 2019 to Spring 2021. Children participated at home, in our lab, and even in their classrooms, but we made sure to always read the survey in the same way so that the procedure did not change between testing locations.

Creating and Confirming the Model

            Once all our data was collected, it was time to think about whether that data was meaningful. One of the things that we wanted to know is whether children’s responses to certain questions in the survey were related to one another. To do this, we used a statistical technique called ‘factor analysis’ to look for themes in children’s response patterns. These themes are invisible. We don’t directly test for them, but the way children respond to the survey suggests that they’re thinking about certain questions in similar ways, and these questions can be grouped together to tell us something meaningful about children’s attitudes towards the internet.

We went through this process not once, but twice. The first time, we used half of our sample (about 400 children) to see what patterns arose, and the second time we used those patterns to create a model and checked if responses from a new set of 400 kids (the other half of the sample) matched the model we had made. Not every statement from our original survey made it into our final model, and that’s okay. If you can find strong patterns with fewer items, this means that the measure will test as much as possible while putting as little burden as possible on children who might complete it as part of a study in the future.

In the end, we found three themes that emerged from all 800 children: accuracy (how correct the internet is), scope (how much information is on the internet), and comfort (how willing and able children were to use the internet on their own). This sounds a lot like the themes from relevant literature that we had kept in mind when creating the survey, so this step showed us that we created a survey that measures what we meant for it to measure!

Using the Model to Learn Something New

            Now we could use our measure to see how different variables might impact children’s attitudes about the internet. We used our participants’ diversity in age, country of participation, and previous internet experiences (measured by the first six items in the survey) to predict their internet attitudes. We found that all of these things shaped what children thought about being online. Here are the three big takeaways:

1. Older children in the sample thought the internet was less accurate than younger children did. Older children were also more comfortable being online.
2. American children thought the internet was less accurate, but could tell them more information, than Chinese children did.
3. Children with a wider variety of experiences online thought that the internet could tell them more information, and they were more comfortable using the internet than children with fewer experiences.

The Takeaway

            Children in America and China are using the internet at extremely high rates, and knowing what they think about the internet can help us understand why they behave in certain ways when they use it. Sometimes, scientists don’t have the tools they need to measure a certain pattern, and so they have to create it. Creating this measure allowed us to see whether children’s attitudes toward the internet changed with age, experience, and country. Moving forward, our research team and other researchers will be able to use this measure again and again to see what else might impact children’s beliefs about being online.