Age influence in gender stereotypes related to Internet use in young people: a case study

Abstract

The existence of gender stereotypes in relation to the use of the Internet led to the need to carry out the present study, which approaches young people perception of the use of the Internet and technologies. Based on knowledge of the existence of gender stereotypes in relation to the use of the Internet, the objective of the study is to detect whether the age of young people, with some previous experience on the Internet, marks differences in relation to the use they make of the Internet; in other words, whether the use made of the world network and the existing stereotypes may or may not have some type of dependent relationship with the age of the subjects. The study was applied in a group of the University of Salamanca (Spain) during the academic year 2018/2019, after the previous realization of activities during four months of sensitization, under the European project WYRED (netWorked Youth Research for Empowerment in the Digital). The final sample was composed by 48 subjects. For this purpose, a questionnaire was applied with 40 final items, which collected different activities that can be carried out on the Internet in order to find out what trend of use they presented in relation to the Internet, in comparison to their age. The two groups consisted of 26 people aged 20 or younger, and 22 people aged 20 or older. By means of a descriptive analysis, and the application of normality tests and non-parametric tests, no dependent relationships were detected between the use of the Internet after carrying out the survey and the age group in which the subject belonged. For the future it would be of special interest to be able to repeat the study comparing the opinion and use of young people on the Internet