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Description
ABSTRACT
In the Project CATE (Children's Access to and Use of Technology Evaluation), based on grades 4-8 children's responses from surveys, focus group participations, and observations in the Saint Louis Public Library, girls' attitudes toward computers and toward their skill level were equally as positive as those of their male counterparts. Girls differed little from boys ill what they wanted to learn and how they used computers, with games the largest portion of observed computer use for both genders. Eighty-five parents queried by survey and ten by focus group responded very similarly about their children's attitudes and use. Juxtaposing this study with other contemporary research findings suggests that some former research results, as well as conventional wisdom about gender differences in relation to computers, no longer hold true for net-generation youth. The need for moving on beyond these already-addressed issues into more sophisticated analyses is established. The Project CATE study is unique in speaking to these gender-related questions in a public library setting. The results draw attention to the public library as a venue for studying informal use of computers and for self-generated information seeking and recreation, as well as homework-related use, in a gender-neutral environment.
INTRODUCTION
Gender differences in children's attitudes about and use of computers have been the focus of many studies since the mid-1980s. Most of the research on this topic has come from the fields of computer science, education, women's studies, psychology, sociology, and the gaming industry. Researchers in the field of library and information studies (LIS) have conducted few studies on this subject. Even fewer studies have been conducted in libraries, and almost none have taken place in public libraries. Yet the opportunity for research in this setting is ripe because both boys and girls frequently use computers in public libraries. A report by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Children, the Digital Divide, and Federal Policy (2004), notes, "public libraries are the third most common place that children go online" (p. 5). This report, it should be noted, provides the statistics for public library computer use broken out by race and ethnicity, but not by gender. Another advantage of the public library is that it allows for observing computer use by youth in the type of informal setting called for by Dresang (1999). Thus, this research study, based on an analysis of data collected from the Saint Louis Public Library, provides insights about the interaction of gender with children's attitudes about and use of computers in a largely unexamined setting.
Children's Access to and Use of Technology Evaluation (Project CATE) was a multifaceted research and demonstration project formulated as a collaboration between the Saint Louis Public Library (SLPL) and the Florida State University (FSU) College of Information. Project CATE was supported by a research grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services, 2001-2003. The three researchers--Eliza T Dresang and Melissa Gross, faculty members in the College of Information at FSU, and Leslie Holt, director of youth services for the Saint Louis Public Library (and with university research experience)--had a mutual interest in how best to provide for children's access to and use of computers in a public library setting. The focus of this report, the interaction between the gender of net-generation youth and computers in a public library setting, was only one strand of the Project CATE research. Reports on additional facets of the Project CATE study can be found in other publications (Dresang, 2005; Dresang & Gross, 2001; Dresang, Gross, & Holt, 2003, 2006; Gross, Dresang & Holt, 2004).
Saint Louis provided a suitable research site for several reasons. Data from the National Institute for Education Statistics (Debell & Chapman, 2003) shows that low-income children and African American children are both more frequent users of computers in public libraries than their counterparts from other racial and economic groups. Child participants in this research project were demographically representative of the Saint Louis community, in which, at the inception of the study, 65.8 percent of the 89,657 children under age eighteen were classified as African American. In 2001, more than 36 percent of children in Saint Louis lived below the government-determined poverty line (Annie E. Casey Foundation, n.d.). Moreover, the SLPL was in the midst of a comprehensive planning process focused on youth and technology and wanted to use an outcome-based approach, something important to the FSU research team. SLPL was one of the original libraries to receive computers from the Gates Foundation, so computers were relatively plentiful. Finally, SLPL users were accustomed to participating in focus groups and other research studies.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS
The following gender-related research questions were addressed in this study:
* What perspectives about gender reflected in net-generation children's attitudes toward and use of computers can be gained from a public library setting?
* How do these findings fit with research about gender, net-generation children, and computers in other studies?
Although not the primary focus of the study, the researchers also considered some of the perspectives about gender reflected in parents' observations about their children's attitudes toward and use of computers.
The limited library and information science research that does deal with youth, gender and computers falls into "four major thematic categories: computer use ..., computer attitude ..., gender and computer information behavior, and gender and computer resource design" (Agosto, 2004a, p. 40). Attitudes here are considered stated emotions, feelings, or perceptions about computers, and use of computers is considered the observed frequency and types of activities that girls and boys choose to carry out on computers. Note that gender-related impact of the computer as a physical object has not been a theme studied by LIS researchers, despite the suggestion of some existing research that physical appearance may relate to gender differences in attitude or use (Carr-Chellman, Marra, & Roberts, 2002). Also addressed in the LIS literature but not in this study, and nonetheless important, are information behaviors such as the comparative success of boys and girls in using computers, their search techniques or approaches, or their ability to determine relevance, and a fourth area, the comparative interaction of youth with the information architecture or resource desist of the sites they access. The published research findings in the two areas on which Project CATE focused, gender in relation to attitude and use, have changed significantly in the past two decades, with a considerably different understanding of the topics addressed in 2006 than even one decade ago.
METHODOLOGY
Multiple data collection and analysis methodologies were used to address the research questions. The researchers prepared a manual and held training sessions for library staff, who in-turn did all of the data collection. Data were collected from student public library users in Grades 4-8 through surveys, focus groups, and in-library observations at six SLPL locations. (1) Surveys were administered, focus groups were conducted, and in-library data were collected near the beginning of the study in order to provide baseline data for determining students' desired outcomes of technology use in the library. Surveys and focus groups were conducted over several weeks in the summer and early fall of 2001, and the in-library observations analyzed here took place in August 2001, during a week that was considered representative of normal use for the summer. Students were asked to check their gender on the surveys. Gender was recorded through observation in the focus groups (audio and videotapes of which were transcribed) and in the in-library observations, during which data were collected using Palm Pilots with forms created with Pendragon software. The in-library observations also included a short survey to inquire whether a child was using the computer for imposed queries, self-generated queries, or play. Non-probability sampling was used to secure participants in the data collection with an effort to represent all ages of youth within the parameters of this study as well as both genders; the in-library data collection attempted to cover all users during a specified time period. Only the surveys included non-users, who were among respondents solicited during public librarian visits to schools in the service areas of the six study locations. Among the survey respondents, 72.3 percent reported being in the library once a month or more. Minimal library users (26, or 12.6 percent) and non-users (31, or 15.0 percent) were also represented in the survey sample. Table 1 shows the number and percentage of youth participants that each type of data collection represents in this study, broken down by gender.
Of the four youth focus groups, one included one middle school female only, and another one middle school male only. The other two groups consisted of both genders and a mixture of middle and elementary students. The researchers chose these configurations with the thought that boys might intimidate the girls. This presumption was not supported. In one mixed focus group the two girls responded more on an average than the six boys. These same two elementary school females also spoke more on-average than did the female students in the all-female middle school group (See Table 2). The lack of evidence for this supposition foreshadowed other areas in the Project CATE study that did not follow conventional wisdom.
Other data used in the analysis came from surveys and focus groups for which parents were the respondents. Surveyed parents were asked to identify the gender of their child in grades 4-8 (and to choose only one child if they had more than one in these grades). Subsequently, they were instructed to answer questions with this child in mind. Eighty-five parents replied to the survey; 40, or 47.1 percent, responded about a male child and 45, or 52.9 percent, responded about a female child. The parents were not necessarily those of the youth who took the survey, although some were. However, no correlation between individual parents and children was attempted.
Ten parents participated in focus groups, providing information about their children or live-in grandchildren. These parents were also asked to identify the number and gender of their children in Grades 4-8, and to focus on one child of the appropriate age. Six children were male and four female.
Quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS to generate descriptive, cross-tabulation tables in order to compare survey responses by gender. Qualitative data were studied using NUD*IST software to identify various themes that appeared throughout and their contexts.
The authors' purpose in this article is to provide an analytical overview of baseline data collected by three different types of research instruments during one time period. Comparison of the current analysis will be made in the section on "use" to findings in a previously published study based on Project CATE in-library observations (Gross et al., 2004). That study focused on only three of the six SLPL locations analyzed here. However, there the authors compared activities among the three branches rather than aggregating the data, and they also cumulated the findings from three different data collections, using a method proposed by Walter (1992) to project library use over a full year. Although the previous article did not center on gender alone, several gender-related observations were made that will also elucidate this look at the data.
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