Page 94 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 43

094 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol.9, 2017

seems to be deepening. Furthermore, traditional poverty alleviation confronts new challenges
created by information poverty and digital poverty which obviously threaten the sustainable
development of our society. It is reasonable for information professionals like librarians to be
responsible for the information equity to approach better social justice, and to discover the origins
of digital poverty.
This paper aims to answer the following questions: What on earth is digital poverty? What
kind of phenomena could be named as digital poverty? What factors should be explanatory
for digital poverty being experienced by rural residents in China? Are they structural, or
individual?

1 Research methods

Field study, aiming to observe deeply and explore the research objects in an all-round way, was
employed in this study to discover penetrations of information and communication technologies in
the sampling villages in the west, middle and east of China. I decided on the field sites in terms of
economic developing levels and informants’ familiarity, and thus selected 8 cities and counties in
6 provinces, including Tianzhu County of Gansu province, Banan District in Chongqing, Guiyang
and Anshun of Guizhou, Chizhou and Wuhu of Anhui, Xiangxi in Hunan, and Jinghai County of
Tianjin (see Table 1).
A group of methods covering in-depth interview, focus group, questionnaire, ethnographic
future interview, participant observation, and action research methods were embedded in the
field study. The questionnaire was designed to be complementary to digital poor individual
cases with basic demographic data and digital behavior data. Furthermore, grounded theory,
content analysis, and descriptive statistical method were adopted to process the field data. The
in-depth interview, which was charged with the most significant data collecting tasks, involves
the following topics, basic information of the village and family, primary understandings and
usage of digital tools, expectations on future society and policies, the recent experiences of help-
seeking in digitalization, and experiments on usage of laptops and mobile phones. The focus
groups in the fields was implemented to collect data in history and development of the village,
education services, public cultural infrastructures, digital poverty on village level, visions of
public policies.
After 65 days of field study in 13 villages in the 6 provinces, I collected comprehensive
data on digital poverty from 337 rural residents, whose interviews account for 362,370 words
and cover the basic information on the villages, demographic data, access and usage of ICTs,
experiences on information access and usage, digital help-seeking behaviors, expectations on
future society and public policies. This paper explores the essence, scope, structural elements of
digital poverty.