In our initial Discovery phase, we added some questions to our case recording system (Casebook) so that we could gather data on our client's internet usage. As the discovery stage was quite a short process, we were only able to get a handful of results which could have meant that any outliers would have a bigger skew on our data.
With that in mind, we have continued to ask these questions to clients ringing our telephone adviceline over a period of months (October 2020 - February 2021), and now have a dataset of 568 entries from different clients.
The questions we asked were:
Do you have regular use of the internet?
and
If so, what do you use it for?
In addition to these extra questions, we always record client profile information when advising somebody for our own records and to satisfy our funders. As the internet questions were recorded alongside the client profiles, we are able to cross reference this data to gain a better understanding of how internet usage differs across our client base.
As we don't always record every category in a client profile (as some people may have declined to answer), the totals for each category are different. As these results are displayed as percentages, we have also removed or combined any answers with very small numbers so as not to wrongly represent any outliers.
Do you have regular use of the internet?
Without any breakdown of client profile, we can see that regular usage of the internet seems quite high (74%) amongst our clients, but is considerably lower than the Internet User Penetration Rate in the UK (2020) of 95.53%. This may partly be explained by our use of the words "regular usage" in our question which may eliminate some people who have internet access but use it infrequently.
Broken down by age range, we can see a clear decline in regular internet usage as people get older.
Clients with a disability or long-term limiting illness are considerably less likely to be regular internet users.
Regular internet usage is considerably lower for clients with no children, than those with children (particularly those with dependant children).
Interestingly, regular internet usage was higher at both ends of the scale for income per calendar month, with the dip in usage for people with an income of £600-£799 pcm.
Finally, we looked to see if regular internet usage changed based on client's location. The darker areas show where a higher percentage of clients regularly used the internet.
If so, what do you use it for?
Our second question was left open-ended, so attracted a range of replies. The word cloud below showsthe wider range of responses (the bigger words were used more to describe internet usage).
To make this data more manageable, we have grouped it together into various areas of internet usage. The graph below shows each area, and the number of clients who identified it as something they use the internet for.
Breaking these areas down by the client's age, we can see that those four are still the most used regardless of age range. What can be seen clearly though, is that older age ranges have a smaller breadth of internet usage.
The table below shows the areas of usage, broken down by age range. The numbers are the percentage of usage within each age range. The heatmap shows a higher percentage of usage in green, and a lower percentage of usage in red. This clearly shows how different age groups interact with the internet.
