Gender and Race Differences in Email Use for Family Purposes?

Milwaukee.
The next speaker at AoIR 2009 is Briana Fox, whose interest is in how gender and race shape family email networks. Are there perceivable differences in how families email amongst themselves that can be explained through such factors, and in the perception of such networks by families from different backgrounds? There is a perception that email in general serves to distance families, that there are no good social relationships which can be conducted through it, or that by contrast the multiple media now available for communication strengthen family ties. Further, gender-based studies show that women email more and rekindle old friendships and relationships; they are also more responsible in general for managing family relationships. Finally, there is very little information on the impact of race on online communication patterns, beyond observations of a general digital divide (at least still in the early 2000s) which makes white users more likely to be online.

Briana examined this using data from the Pew Project, gathered in 2000 and 2001, exploring this in terms of gender and race as well as in terms of different family relationships. This also needed to be controlled for other variables, of course (age, education, family income, marital status, employment, level of Internet experience, level of extraversion or intraversion, etc.). What also emerged here was that parents were more likely than non-parents to complete the surveys, which may affect the results of this study, the same was true for those with higher education, or with more online activity.

What she found was that there was no difference related gender or race in overall family emailing practices - however, women were more likely than men to email parents or grandparents, siblings, or children at home; blacks seemed less likely than whites to email extended family; but differences between whites and blacks were also driven mainly by the fact that at the time, whites were more likely to be online than blacks.

Women were also more likely to thing that email brought them closer to their family, enabled them to be more frank, enabled them to learn more about family, and improved their relationship with family; there were no statistically significant results in terms of race. It seems that women are more strongly embracing technological innovations that enable them to keep in touch with their family and play a kinkeeper role - an observation also made some decades ago about another exciting new media technology: the telephone.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, email, family, gender, race
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, email, family, gender, race