USE OF COMMUNITY ICTS 87
H3. There is a significant relationship between education and use
when all other research variables are controlled for.
H4. There is a significant relationship between income and use when
all other research variables are controlled for.
Research question 2 examines the factors affecting use in two separate
groups, users with an alternative service and users without one. Research
question 3 compares the characteristics between the two groups in three
aspects. These two research questions were investigated in a descriptive
mode because of insufficient empirical evidence to establish hypotheses.
Method
Research Design and Participants
The current study employed a survey research method that is widely used
for information technology and communication research. In surveying the
community network users, the current study chose a single community
network. A multisite study would need to deal with the influence of many
known and unknown extraneous variables, such as differences in computer
and networking resources, staff expertise, organizational structures, service
priorities, size and urbanization of the service area, and so forth [3]. Unless
these extraneous variables were properly controlled for, their influence
would contaminate the relationships between research variables. A single
study site helped avoid this problem and made interpretations of the research
findings more unequivocal.
The community network selected for this study is one of many successfully
operating generic community networks in the United States. Established
in 1993 as a community service of a Graduate School of Library and
Information Science at a large Midwestern university, this community network
was serving over five thousand citizens and five hundred organizational
members at the time of the study. It provided a full range of Internet
services, including e-mail, newsgroups, listservs, WWW, FTP, telnet, Web
hosting, IT training, and help desk service. Similar to many other community
networks, this one imposed a weekly Internet connection time
restriction due to the limited resources of the organization. Available connection
options included both a menu-based text interface and a graphical
browser. This community network had been a recipient of many information
technology grants from local and federal agencies, including the
Telecommunication and Information Infrastructure Assistance Program
(TIIAP), the largest federal funding program for community networks
under the initiative of the National Information Infrastructure. This grant