Digital participation? Internet use among adolescents with and without intellectual disabilities: A comparative study

Abstract

Internet use is an integrated part of everyday life, especially among young people. However, knowledge of this for young people with disabilities is scarce. This study investigates digital participation of adolescents with intellectual disabilities by comparing aspects of Internet use among adolescents with and without intellectual disabilities. Cross-sectional comparative design was used and a national survey from the Swedish Media Council was cognitively adapted for adolescents with intellectual disabilities aged 13–20 years. The results reveal that a significantly lower proportion of the 114 participating adolescents with intellectual disabilities had access to Internet-enabled devices and performed Internet activities, except for playing games, than the reference group ( n = 1161). The greatest difference was found in searching for information. Analyses indicate that adolescents with intellectual disabilities are following a similar pattern of Internet use as the reference group, but a digital lag is prevalent, and a more cognitively accessible web could be beneficial.

Internet use among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities in South Korea

“…Meanwhile, our findings were similar to the Internet use among adults with IDD in Spain and in Sweden (Ågren et al, 2019;Chiner et al, 2017 Notably, adults with IDDs perceived fewer benefits of using the Internet regarding increased knowledge, or work or study efficiency.…”

Video‐blogs and linguistic simplification for students with intellectual disability

“…Thus, we can elucubrate that older students with intellectual disability probably have enough experience with watching videos for learning, which would allow them to develop efficient regulation strategies, as in text reading. In fact, as previous studies have shown, individuals with intellectual disability report to watch videos for learning and for fun more frequently than other text‐based activities like reading news (Alfredsson Ågren et al, 2020; Delgado et al, 2019).…”

Fostering Digital Participation for People with Intellectual Disabilities and Their Caregivers: Towards a Guideline for Designing Education Programs

“…This is particularly astonishing considering that the smartphone, as a so-called smart product (Lee & Shin, 2017), contains many technical functions and possibilities to facilitate access to the Internet for this group of people (e.g., read aloud function, text reader, autocomplete functions). Ågren, Kjellberg, and Hemmingson (2019) revealed that Internet usage between young people with and without intellectual disabilities (aged between 13-20 years) differed in a significantly lower proportion in terms of "access to internet-enabled devices and performed ac-tivities…than the reference group." The authors noted, however, that some web applications are associated with a high degree of cognitive and linguistic skills that arise as barriers for people with intellectual disabilities.…”