Since the early 1990s, the Internet has been growing rapidly throughout the world. Most people believe that the new technology will eventually have a profound impact on our social and cultural lives. Numerous books and articles have been published on the subject of the Internet, covering such themes as politics, economics, military affairs, morality, law, mass media, communications, etc. Directed by Jeffery Cole, the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA launched “World Internet Project” (WIP) in 1999 (http://www.worldinternetproject.org or http://www.ccp.ucla.edu), with the goal of assessing the social impact of the Internet based on questionnaire surveys. The UCLA study is unlike most commercial surveys of the Internet in the following respects:
• It examines not only Internet usage but also the social impact of usage.
• It focuses equally on Internet users and non-users.
• Its longitudinal research tracks behavioral and attitudinal changes.
• It represents a worldwide effort to study and compare changes in different countries and regions.
In additon to the basic idea of doing survey on Internet use and its impact and share the core questions from UCLA Center for Communication Policy, the CASS Internet research has the following characteristics:
• It focuses on urban residents rather than the nation as a whole.5
• It is based on door-to-door household interview allowing respondents to answer the questionnaire by reading and reflecting upon it.
• It contains seperate surveys on adults and teenagers.
• It includes case studies in small cities.
Hence we employed a multi-stage sampling method to conduct the Internet survey in three municipal-level cities in China (metropolitan cities, provincial capitals, and small cities), targeting male and female urban residents between the ages of 17 and 60. The metropolitan cities included Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou; the provincial capitals included Chengdu, Changsha, Xi\'an, and Shenyang; and the small cities included Nanhai in Guangdong province, Yima in Henan province, Jimo in Shandong province, Guangshui in Hubei province, and Fengnan in Hebei province. Taking into consideration the factors of population, geographic location, economic development, and accessibility, the sample covers two municipalities directly under the central government - Beijing and Shanghai - and selected cities in eight provinces.
To get as clear a picture as possible, the survey was conducted during the Spring Festival, the Chinese New Year, from January 15 to 25, so as to include college students, who are important members of the user group but only return home during the New Year vacation. (interviews in Guangzhou and Nanhai in Guangdong province were delayed until the end of February because of the outbreak of SARS). For details of the sampling design and characteristics of the sample, please refer to Appendix II.
After the fieldwork, all the data were processed in Beijing. Every questionnaire was first checked by the supervisors and then the original interviewees were contacted via phone for any missed questions. The questionnaires were coded by double data entry to minimize entry errors. The raw data were stored in ASCII format and the data cleaning, such as the logical check and the outliers check, was done in STATA. All errors found in the STATA checks were double-checked manually against the questionnaires and corrected accordingly. In the end, the number of final valid cases was 3,941, including 2,457 Internet users and 1,484 Internet non-users (Internet users were defined as those who had accessed the Internet at least one time during the past half-year).
The English version of the survey report was released at Markle Foundation in November of 2003,
and the relevant link is:
The full report in PDF format can be downloaded from here, please press the right key of mouse to download: |
