Presentation at the AoIR23 conference

Jošt Bartol, member of the Centre for Social Informatics participated in the virtual conference of the Association for Internet Researchers (AoIR), which took place from October 18 to 21. He presented two original contributions which were prepared together with his co-authors dr. Andraž Petrovčič, dr. Marina Trkman, dr. Bianca C. Reisdorf and dr. Vasja Vehovar titled : “Antecedents of privacy protection behaviors at the vertical and horizontal levels” and “Testing the role of categorical and resource inequalities in indirect internet uses of older adults: A path analysis.” The abstracts of the contributions will be published at https://spir.aoir.org/ojs/index.php/spir/index.

In the first paper, "Antecedents of privacy protection behaviors at the vertical and horizontal levels," the authors analyzed the differences between people's privacy protection behaviors on the internet in relation to institutions (vertical level) and in relation to other internet users (horizontal level). They found that men were more likely to protect themselves from institutions and women from other users, while older adults were less likely to protect their privacy on the internet compared to their younger counterparts. Other important factors were the number of social media used, information privacy concerns, and online privacy literacy, all of which increased online privacy protection at both levels.

In the second paper, "Testing the role of categorical and resource inequalities in indirect internet uses of older adults: A path analysis", the authors focused on indirect internet uses among older non-users (65+). Indirect internet use is a practice whereby (less) skilled users or non-users ask other users (i.e., internet proxies) to perform internet activities on their behalf. Drawing on the resources and appropriation theory, they present an innovative model where individual categories (e.g., gender, education) influence resources (social and material capital), which in turn influence access to internet proxies and indirect internet uses. Testing the model with path analysis showed that the Resources and appropriation theory is useful in explaining indirect internet uses. At the same time, the study showed that there are significant differences in digital engagement also among internet non-users.

The study was conducted as part of Jošt Bartol's Young Researcher fellowship, funded by the Slovenian Research Agency of the Republic of Slovenia, and co-funded from the research projects J5-2558 (The Implications of Proxy Internet Use for the Internet Skills of Older Adults) and V5-2275 (Digital inequalities and older adults in Slovenia: An evaluation of the measures implemented under the Digital Inclusion Promotion Act) and the research program P5-0399 (Internet research).