The Third-Level Digital Divide: Who Benefits Most from Being Online?

Abstract Purpose Research into the explanations of digital inclusion has moved from investigations of skills and usage to tangible outcomes, what we label here as the third-level digital divide. There is a lack of theoretical development about which types of people are most likely to benefit. Understanding how achieving outcomes of internet use is linked to other types of (dis)advantage is one of the most complex aspects of digital inclusion research because very few reliable and valid measures have been developed. In the current study we took a first step toward creating an operational framework for measuring tangible outcomes of internet use and linking these to the inequalities identified by digital divide…