Study: Blacks Use Net Less Than Whites

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April 16, 1998 (12:00 AM EDT)

By John Borland,

A Vanderbilt University study to be published in Science Magazine Friday found white students use the Web far more than black students, even when income differences are taken into account.

The differences in Net use were most pronounced among students who did not have their own computers, researchers Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak found. White students without their own PCs were more than three times as likely to have gone online within a week of being surveyed than their black counterparts, the study says.

That gap was underscored by findings that 73 percent of white students own their own home computers, compared with only 32 percent of blacks. This difference remained even after income differences between the two groups were accounted for, the authors said.

"The policy implication is obvious," the authors wrote. "To ensure the participation of all African Americans in the information revolution, it is critical to improve educational opportunities for African Americans."

The study follows news reports minority enrollment in engineering schools has dropped considerably in recent years.

Hoffman (http://www2000.ogsm.vanderbilt.edu
/dhvita.html) and Novak (http://mba.vanderbilt.edu
/FacultyGuide/ThomasPNovak.html) are professors at Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management, in Nashville, Tenn.

The study's results add fuel to fears of a growing divide between high-tech haves and have-nots. "The consequences ... of a persistent racial divide on the Internet may be severe," the authors said. "If a significant segment of our society is denied equal access to the Internet, U.S. firms will lack the technological skills needed to remain competitive."

Income differences made up the largest difference in computer and Web use, the authors found. Blacks with relatively high incomes were even more likely to have used the Web at work than were whites.

The authors said high-income blacks were more likely to be younger, working in a computer-related profession, and have a college education, than high-income whites. "Race matters to the extent that societal biases have either required African Americans to obtain higher education levels in order to achieve the same income as whites, or resulted in older African Americans not being able to achieve high incomes," they said.

At incomes under the national median of $40,000, however, whites were slightly more likely to have Net access at work, and were six times more likely to have gone online anywhere in the past week than were blacks.

"Our findings ... suggest the presence of a powerful bias that could restrict Internet use to a narrow segment of African Americans," the authors wrote. "It is important to create access points for African Americans in libraries, community centers, and other nontraditional places where individuals may access the Internet, and to encourage use at these locations."

The study's conclusions were drawn from a CommerceNet/Nielsen Internet demographic study done in early 1997. CommerceNet said it predicts the number of Net users will grow from 58 million last year to about 87 million this year.

Overall, the study found close to 5 million blacks in the United States had gone online by the time of the survey, compared with about 40 million whites.