Page 84 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2018 Vol. 44

YAN Hui / Fuel in the snowy weather or icing on the cake? Exploration of social network’s value in alleviation of digital poverty 083

According to the above encoding framework and quantitative criteria, eight digital poverty
variables of the selected samples are quantified one by one. Then, based on the values of the eight
variables, specific types are respectively assigned to the samples. Individuals, whose variable
values of digital tools and digital services were both zero, are defined as the physically poor.
Individuals with the digital psychology value of zero are defined as the psychologically vulnerable.
Individuals with the digital ability value of zero are classified as the digitally illiterate. Individuals,
whose variable value of digital efforts is zero, are considered as the digitally idle. Individuals,
whose variable value of digital social support is zero, are defined as the socially lonely. Individuals
with the digital social norm value of zero are defined as digital resisters. Individuals with the
digital impact value of zero are defined as vain seekers. Individuals, whose eight variable values
are all zero, are defined as the digital extremely poor. The number of each sort of digital poor
people is summarized in Table 2.

Table 2. Appearing frequency of each kind of digital poor people.
Type Physical Vulnerable Illiterate Idle Lonely Resistant Vain Extre. poor
Frequency 27 38 71 58 39 36 70 6

In particular, it is necessary to take into account the convenient sampling of the selected sites and
in-depth interviews in the field study, and qualitative research method emphasizes the categories
of concepts or variables rather than the number of a certain category. As a result, the number
summarized is neither representative nor propagable, and is only used to help readers understand
the situation of each type of digital poor people. Table 2 makes it clear that there is sufficient
evidence to show objective existence of the eight typical types of digital poverty. According to the
summarized data, besides that the one hundred and seventeen respondents on whom the above-
mentioned eight types of digital poverty are composed or overlapped are considered as digital poor
people, there are still forty-seven respondents whose values of all variables are not zero. These
cases can be compared to analyze the impact of different social networks on people with different
degrees of digitization, especially on the digital poor people.

2 Assessment of the overall role of social networks in reducing digital poverty

Based on the results of overlapping typical types of digital poverty in Table 2, the author
summarizes composite digital poor people from the selected cases. Cases of seven digital poverty
types (the value of the horizontal axis is seven), that is, the digital extremely poor are the least
in the samples, and cases of a single digital poverty type (the value of the horizontal axis is one)
appear the most. The frequencies of different types of digital poverty are meaningless in ranking,
but indicate us in a way the various possible combinations of these different types of digital
poverty. Categories of the digital poor who are formed by overlapping seven types of digital