AMANDA HYNAN FINAL THESIS PDF

2.4.3. Internet use by youth populations
According to Lathouwers, Moor and Didden (2009), little data is available on use of
the internet by disabled young people as most research has focused on non-disabled
adolescents and the evidence that is available is sometimes conflicting from different
countries. They cite Clancy (2002) and DeBell and Chapman (2003) as finding
reduced internet use within different groups of young people with disabilities
(physical, visual or hearing) in comparison to non-disabled peers in the USA. This
was also suggested by Raghavendra, Wood, Newman and Lawry (2012b) who found
reduced internet use by Australian adolescents with physical disabilities in
comparison to peers without disabilities. In contrast, Lidstrom, Ahlsten and
Hemmingsson (2010) compared questionnaire information from 215 Swedish children
and youths with physical disabilities (mean age 12.10 years) with data from the ‘Kids
and Media 2006’ (a survey by the Swedish Media Council), (Mediaradet 2006, cited
by Lidstrom et al. 2010), to compare reported activities outside of school. They found
a higher proportion of children with physical disabilities were engaged with ICT
activities as they had a more uniform profile than children without disabilities who
were engaged in a broader range of activities outside school. This higher level of use
was also found within hearing impaired young people in Israel who used the internet
for significantly longer each week than hearing individuals (Barak & Sadovsky,
2008).
Gross (2004) says, within westernised societies,
“the increasing pervasiveness of the internet in the lives of adolescents is now well
established” (p. 634).
Valkenburg and Peter (2009) review research looking at the social consequences of
internet use by adolescents. They note that in the 1990s much research suggested that
being online had a negative effect on the social connectedness of adolescents. They
suggest the reasons for these findings may be firstly, very few adolescents were online
then, so those that were, had little access to the remainder of their offline social
networks and, secondly the types of sites available did not encourage social
connections in the way instant messaging and social networking sites (like Facebook)
currently do. The current prevalence of use indicates adolescents are likely to have
40