Survey Measures of Web-Oriented Digital Literacy

TLDR

The study develops survey measures of web‑oriented digital literacy as cost‑effective proxies for observed skill measures and offers recommendations on which measures best reflect users’ actual web‑use skills. The authors evaluated these survey measures by comparing them with performance tests in a study that used observations and survey questions, and administered the measures on the General Social Survey 2000 and 2002 Internet modules to assess validity and applicability to large‑scale data. Composite survey knowledge variables proved to be stronger predictors of actual digital literacy than self‑perceived ability measures, which are commonly used in the literature.

Abstract

This article presents survey measures of web-oriented digital literacy to serve as proxies for observed skill measures, which are much more expensive and difficult to collect for large samples. Findings are based on a study that examined users’ digital literacy through both observations and survey questions, making it possible to check the validity of survey proxy measures. These analyses yield a set of recommendations for what measures work well as survey proxies of people’s observed web-use skills. Some of these survey measures were administered on the General Social Survey 2000 and 2002 Internet modules, making the findings relevant for the use of existing large-scale national data sets. Results suggest that some composite variables of survey knowledge items are better predictors of people’s actual digital literacy based on performance tests than are measures of users’ self-perceived abilities, a proxy traditionally used in the literature on the topic.