Prospects for Poor Neighborhoods in the Broadband Era

This research explores the role of place in Internet use at work, investigating the role that neighborhood context may play in opportunities to gain technology skills and access to relatively better paying jobs. Examining both individual and neighborhood attributes, the authors carry out a comprehensive survey of individuals within three distinct cities in Northeast Ohio combined with a methodology that allows generation of location-specific contextual information. Together, these data are modeled in a series of logistic regressions that compare the importance of both individual and contextual attributes. The findings demonstrate that individual characteristics, especially job type, education, and income, are strongly related to workplace Internet use and that neighborhood unemployment is associated with lower probabilities of technology use at work.