Home Use of Digital Technologies by Teens: The Role of Family, School, and Peers

Abstract

The use of digital technologies is an important part of life for most adolescents. Digital technologies can play a role of varying significance in their everyday lives, and the adolescents may use the digital technologies in differing degrees. In this chapter, we focus on investigating and uncovering various factors, such as the personality characteristics of the adolescents, family background, the use of digital technologies in school, and the use of digital technologies in communication with peers, that can contribute to explaining the degrees of use of ICT by present-day (Czech) adolescents. We focus on the use of digital technologies outside of school, specifically in the home environment, maintaining the important distinction in the use of digital technologies for leisure activities and the use of digital technologies for school activities such as homework.In the first part of the chapter, we state the topic of the chapter and gradually present various aspects that the existing research indicates can play important roles in the use of digital technologies by present-day fifteen-year-olds. We then describe a conceptual model that we use in the subsequent analyses. We present research questions, and we describe the methodology of this part of the research, including a basic description of the individual variables used in the analyses. In the subchapters, we present the results of the analyses and we provide answers to the set research questions. In the final part, we summarize our findings and set them in a wider context.KeywordsDigital technologiesAdolescentSchoolFamilyPeersLeisure activitiesHomeworkPISA