DISTANT FRIENDS ONLINE? RURAL AND URBAN ADOLESCENTS’ COMMUNICATION ON THE INTERNET.

This study explores how rural and urban adolescents use the Internet as a tool for communication in their social environment. It aims to analyse the differences in the use of the Internet to overcome environmental constraints between urban and rural adolescents. In this paper, environmental constraints are defined in two ways: (1) The lack of contacts that a person may have in his/her local environment and (2) The distance between the contacts that prevents him/her from having face-to-face social interaction. The empirical part of the research is a questionnaire-based survey of two samples of pre-university high school pupils in Den Bosch and Winterswijk in the Netherlands. The outcomes of the research show that pupils in the urban area find more emotional support in their physical environment than pupils from the rural area and that they also receive more emotional support via the Internet than their rural counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]