Effective interventions aimed at tackling digital exclusion need to take into consideration national contexts, changing non-user characteristics, and individual experience with the internet. What worked a decade ago in a particular country might not work currently in a different or even the same country.

Original citation:Helsper, Ellen J. and Reisdorf, Bianca C. (2013) This article investigates patterns of reasons for digital disengagement of British adults. It adds a psychological dimension to research that is mostly sociological in nature in trying to separate out explanations for disengaging from the Internet by choice or by forced exclusion. The analysis of a nationally representative survey shows differences between the number of reasons and the most important reasons among different sociodemographic groups, but also among individuals with different psychological profiles. The findings suggest that ex-and nonusers do not have one simple reason for nonuse, but a multifaceted range of reasons, which often represent disadvantages at several levels. The range of often mentioned reasons, moreover, shows that motivations for disengagement cannot be measured by means of the most important reason, but that all reasons have to be taken into account and looked at concertedly.

Research into digital inequalities has shifted from a binary view of Internet use versus non-use to studying gradations in Internet use. However, this research has mostly compared categories of users only. In addition, the role of attitudes in digital inequalities has been largely overlooked. This article addresses these limitations by performing a systematic analysis of factors that distinguish low Internet users from non-users, regular users, and broad users. In addition to socio-demographic characteristics, we examine attitudinal variables. Results drawn from multinomial regressions indicate that attitudes play at least as large a role as socio-economic factors in determining the likelihood of belonging to specific (non-)user categories. This identifies positive attitudes toward technologies and the Internet as a crucial step toward Internet adoption. Hence, digital inequality research needs to consider factors other than traditional socio-economic ones to draw a complete picture.

Despite societal dependence on digital technologies and the Internet across the developed world, current prisoner rehabilitation, reentry models, and practices across most U.S. state correctional systems only target offline realms and issues while disregarding the digital realm. By integrating existing models of rehabilitation and reentry with recently developed and refined digital divide theories, this article develops a new model of digital rehabilitation, considering both the online and the offline realms. The proposed model fills a gap in the literature and allows for a more complete understanding of the problems that parolees encounter on release from prison. By conceptualizing corresponding fields and resources across three realms—prison, reentry, and digital—the digital rehabilitation and reentry model enables systematic research into the extent to which the digital realm can assist in a more successful reentry process.

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