This longitudinal study explores differences in Internet access and use among school-aged children in Italian-speaking Switzerland and whether and how these differences contribute to inequalities in academic performance. Applying multilevel structural equation modeling with two-wave original survey data from 843 students, their parents, as well as students’ end-term school grades, we show that a family’s socio-economic status indirectly affects children’s school grades as lower parental income leads children to use the Internet more frequently for entertainment and online communication purposes. This form of Internet use also increases as children have more personal digital media devices. As children’s increased use of the Internet for entertainment and online communication worsens their academic performance, our results suggest that social inequalities due to children’s socio-economic status are reinforced by a second-order digital divide. We discuss potential reasons for our findings as well as their implications and recommendations for possible interventions.
This article provides the first-ever analysis of the structure of public preferences for asylum and refugee policy, a highly politicized policy area that has attracted little scholarly attention to date. We first conceptualise the core dimensions of asylum and refugee policy and then conduct an original conjoint experiment with 12,000 respondents across eight European countries to examine how different policy designs impact on public support. Our results demonstrate that Europeans are generally committed to policies that provide protection to asylum-seekers and refugees but this commitment tends to be contingent upon policy features which allow for a means of control, namely through the implementation of limits or conditions. We find this pattern of preferences to be remarkably similar in both the old and more recent EU Member States that we surveyed. Our results imply that some aspects of the current model of the international refugee system are misaligned with the more control-based model that Europeans would prefer. We conclude by discussing our findings in the context of existing research and ongoing political debates about policy reforms.
The protection of asylum seekers and refugees has become one of the most politically divisive issues in the European Union, yet there has been a lack of research on public preferences for asylum and refugee policies. This article analyzes which policies Europeans prefer and why. We advance a theoretical framework that explains how asylum and refugee policies that use limits and conditions enable individuals to resolve conflicting humanitarian and perceived national interest logics. Using an original conjoint experiment in eight countries, we demonstrate that Europeans prefer policies that provide refugee protection but also impose control through limits or conditions. In contrast to the divisive political debates between European Union member states, we find consistent public preferences across European countries.
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