Folks, It's bad enough when reporters and blogs comment on press releases, but I'd hope that participants in the Assoc of Internet RESEARCHERS list would RTFS itself before posting comments on this list. Not the 1/2 page newspaper report, and not even the few-page statscan media summary. Especially as the report is available for free download at www.statscan.ca Having said that, I'll make the following points (and have made them in 2 media interviewers already: a) It's not my (or NetLab's) study, but a lead researcher asked me to be available yesterday for media commentary. (First I heard of the study, btw, so I had to do some quick reading). b) correlation NE causality. c) internet pop is demographically different than non-users (altho study does use MCA to control for some differences). I would have liked to have seen an apples-apples comparison: e.g., middle-aged married men with young kids. THis may explain some of the lesser housework results. d) Heavy users are defined as TWO (not 1) hours in the past 24 hours. (i.e., a previous poster got this wrong.) e) Statscan used standard time-budget / time-use methods, including asking for primary and secondary activities (i.e., schmoozing with spouse while net surfing). f) I agree that there is a tilt towards ignoring the socializing part of internet use, altho towards the end, the authors do say that the largest chunk of use is email, IM, chat, etc. g) But as one reporter (www.globeandmail.com) just asked me, is the nature of online socializing similar to F2F. h) There may be a Zen half-full / half-empty effect. For example, heavy users do an adjusted 33 minutes less of housework and somewhat less HH socializing. OTOH, our Connected Lives paper shows that "only" 36% of the folks we studied have any stress about their spousal unit being online too much (and most of this that stress is minor). So is it the similarity or the difference that should be emphasized. I expect Tracy Kennedy will use CL data to delve into this more in the next year. But please RTFS before commenting. This ain't a research-free blog. Barry _____________________________________________________________________ Barry Wellman Professor of Sociology NetLab Director wellman at chass.utoronto.ca http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman Centre for Urban & Community Studies University of Toronto 455 Spadina Avenue Toronto Canada M5S 2G8 fax:+1-416-978-7162 You're invited to visit & contribute to the new version of "Updating Cybertimes: It's Time to Bring Our Culture into Cyberspace" http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php _____________________________________________________________________