Age and internet use in Canada
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Canada ranks as the 11th country in the world for Internet usage with 20.45 million users, 63.5% of the total population. 53.6% of Canadians connect to the Internet using a type of high-speed connection, compared to 33.8% in the US. In addition, habits of online Canadians differ greatly from Americans. In particular, 48% of Internet users connect at least three times per day. The topic of Internet market research has become very important in recent years. Internet marketers will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for reports, surveys, and other relevant data. However, it is possible to discover a wealth of information using the very tool being investigated, the Internet.
[edit] Age and internet use
The following graph was obtained from the Statistics Canada Household Internet Use Survey. It shows the percentage of households using the Internet, categorized by the age of the head of household. The highest rates of use are seen in the lowest age group (less than 35). However, it is important to note that only those of age fifteen or older were included in the survey. In addition, the less than 35 group and the second lowest group (35-54) are both very similar throughout all years of the study. Over the period of the Statistics Canada study (1998-2002), these lower age groups also showed a higher growth rate concerning Internet use rates. Despite these facts, in recent years, the older age groups have shown higher growth rates than the younger groups.
The next set of data is from a survey by the GVU Center of the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The survey is the 10th WWW User Survey of October 1998. The survey included respondents worldwide, including 189 Canadians. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the Internet, this data is slightly out of date. However, the analysis performed is not the proportion of users by age, but rather the number of years specific age groups have been using the Internet. Both the age groups and the number of years were split into categories, so the values displayed are the midpoints of those categories. The group with a number of years on the Internet greater than seven, is shown as seven on the graph below. The size of the bubbles on the graph represents the number of respondents that fall in that category. Most of the rows show few trends by age in the years of Internet use. However, the line representing five years if Internet use shows a distinct inverse relationship. As the age of the user increases, the number of people who have used the Internet for five years decreases.
Another question asked by the GVU survey was how satisfied the respondent was with their computer skills. The graph below shows those who were very satisfied with their skills. The mean age for those very satisfied with their skills was 35.3, with a standard deviation of 1.88. The graph is highly skewed to the right. This shows that younger computer users are more satisfied with their skills than older users. This makes sense because most younger users would have been introduced to computers at an earlier age, while older users still have a lot to learn. Older users may also feel they have more to learn because their children or grandchildren are far more knowledgeable on the subject. Most people recognize the field of technology as constantly changing and they feel their skills will never be adequate. However, all of these inhibitions seem to be more prevalent in the older age groups. Younger age groups are more inclined to feel satisfied with what they know.
For some, the Internet can seem very dangerous. Reports of fraud, theft, and vandalism online are enough to deter some people from going online. Many people are simply not comfortable with computers and feel that they can accomplish everything they need in a more traditional manner. The graph below shows those who said they were very comfortable with the Internet on the GVU survey. The data are skewed to the right, with a mean of 35.5 and a standard deviation of 1.92. This shows that younger people are more comfortable with the Internet than older people. The distribution of the data is almost identical to that of the above data. This suggests that Internet-related statistics follow a similar trend of a right-skewed distribution.
The data shown above all shown a trend of suggesting that younger users are more comfortable, more confident, and more inclined to use the Internet. However, it is also beneficial to analyse each age group individually to determine whether or not older or younger age groups fall above or below average rates of Internet use. Following the hypothesis, I suspect that teenagers will use the Internet more than the average Canadian and that seniors will use the Internet less than the average Canadian. This was shown above using the graph of Internet use rates by age. More statistics such as time spent online are also available and these should also be considered in the examination of Internet trends.
I work as tech support executive for bell canada ISP company,it is huge company has got more than 1000 tech support executives to serve customers,this shows how frequently they(Canadian's) use internet ,assume that each agent takes 30 calls for 8 hrs of login it means that we r having 30,000 customers trying to go online daily
