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Non-use of the Internet has often been researched within the topic of digital divides. The focus of these studies lay mainly on differences in socio-economic backgrounds and resources. This paper goes one step further by attempting to describe various groups of non-users in two highly developed European countries: Great Britain and Sweden. Results from descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, and principal components analysis with two waves of comparable data from 2007 and 2009 show a more heterogeneous non-user population in Great Britain and a slightly more homogeneous one in Sweden. Socio-economic factors play a bigger role in influencing who is going online in Britain than in Sweden. Education, occupational status, and household income are significant determinants in both countries. The most important determinants of Internet adoption are age and occupational status. The analysis of a 25-55-year-old sub-sample shows that non-users from this age group feature different socio-economic characteristics from older age groups. Middle-aged British non-users share two specific socio-economic characteristics: low income and unemployment; 25-55-year-old Swedish non-users tend to have low incomes, be unemployed, and be single. Non-users' self-assessment of reasons for non-use do not seem to be consistent with the 'raw data'. Non-users mainly state that they are not interested in the Internet. Many non-users share sceptical attitudes about the Internet, which influences interest in them. There needs to be more detailed research to know exactly which people are not using the Internet and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study focuses on teens' use of communication technologies to maintain connections with people from their everyday peer group. It departs from a pre-defined network (in a secondary school in Flanders, Belgium) and investigates how friendship type and clique formation (an important dynamic in this (micro) context) are related to face-to-face communication (FTFC) and the use of email, instant messaging, text messaging, telephone and social network sites in this network. Hypotheses/expectations were derived from network theory and (qualitative and quantitative) studies on the social affordances of communication technologies for adolescents. Data were collected among the 78 pupils of a fourth grade (15–16-year-olds) in a Belgian secondary school. First, dyadic quadratic assignment procedure regression analyses were run to explain the frequency of FTFC and communication through different technologies by looking at dyad characteristics (strength of ties, number of friends in common, same sex…). Second, FTFC and communication through technologies were compared for in-group versus out-group ties. The analyses show that the patterns of FTFC were sometimes reproduced (and therefore extended), and sometimes deviated from in communication through technologies. The specific function each of the studied technologies fulfilled in relation to social structure (in this network) is addressed in the discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]