Allen Spencer
Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, 500 S. State St. Room 3001, Ann Arbor, MI 48109.
Socius. 2025 Jan-Dec;11. doi: 10.1177/23780231251363238. Epub 2025 Aug 7.
Since the turn of the century, sociologists and other scholars concerned about digital inequality have most often been concerned about disparities in the quality of internet use, not necessarily the availability of internet access itself. However, the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare the fact that the internet's potential benefits to mitigating the spread of the virus were only available to those with internet access. In this visualization, I use household-level data from the American Community Survey from 2013 - 2023 (N = 10,713,204 households) to estimate a linear probability model predicting internet access by race/ethnicity, household educational attainment, and poverty status. Results suggest that household internet access has increased over the past decade, but disparities still exist on all three dimensions.
自世纪之交以来，关注数字不平等的社会学家和其他学者最常关注的是互联网使用质量的差异，而不一定是互联网接入本身的可用性。然而，新冠疫情暴露了一个事实，即互联网在减轻病毒传播方面的潜在好处只惠及那些能够接入互联网的人。在本可视化展示中，我使用了2013年至2023年美国社区调查的家庭层面数据（N = 10,713,204户家庭）来估计一个线性概率模型，该模型通过种族/族裔、家庭受教育程度和贫困状况来预测互联网接入情况。结果表明，家庭互联网接入在过去十年有所增加，但在所有这三个维度上仍然存在差异。
