Internet Use, Homenet Study and

In the mid-1990s, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University founded the HomeNet Project, in which they gave Internet access to families across the United States and then documented how the family members used the Internet through a series of studies. The final accumulation of data comes from a series of longitudinal studies, done every year between 1995 and 2002, that look at how families use the World Wide Web, email, instant messaging, online chat groups, bulletin boards, weblogs, and other technologies associated with the Internet. A total of 264 families participated in the series of studies; the first groups of families were from the Pittsburgh area and the later ones from a national pool. Ten professors from Carnegie Mellon oversaw the research for the project and published articles in a number of scholarly journals based on the data culled from the project, which was funded in part from a grant from the National Science Foundation and supported by numerous companies who provided the computers, Internet access, and other technology needed for the project.

Of particular interest with respect to children and adolescents is one of the earlier study's finding that greater use of the Internet can be associated with declines in the size of participants' social networks, declines in communication within the family, and, for teenagers, declines in social support. Furthermore, the researchers contended in the early study that heavy use of the Internet could be associated with loneliness and depression, but that after a person's first years online, the negative symptoms may drop or reverse. These increases in depressive symptoms were found to be greater for those with more social resources, such as people who regularly communicate in person with others or those who belong to more community organizations. Many scholars criticized this finding and argued that the measures and samples used to find the data were flawed, and in a follow-up study several years later within the HomeNet project, the researchers changed their own initial findings, saying that the participants' use of the Internet had a generally positive impact on communication, social involvement, and well-being.

One of the studies for the project examines the role of communication technologies in maintaining long-distance friendships of teenagers over a three-year period as they move from high school into college. The authors found that communication slows the decline in psychological closeness as students move away from their high school friends, but psychological closeness does not slow the decline in communication. They cite email and instant messaging as the Internet technologies that are especially useful for maintaining friendships and psychological closeness among the teens. Another article on the topic of instant messaging found that adolescents depend on instant messaging not only to maintain closeness with individual peers but also to forge social identity within peer groups. The authors contend that the simulated act of “hanging out” with friends was bolstered by the lack of rigidity and social norms that might be encountered in spending time with peer groups in real life.

[Page 442]Despite some criticism of the methodology and findings within the research, the HomeNet studies continue to be widely cited in both academic and professional circles as some of the more interesting early research on the effect of Internet use on people's lives.

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