A typology of adolescents' technology use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A latent profile analysis

Tamara Kastorff; Michael Sailer; Karsten Stegmann

doi:10.1016/j.ijer.2023.102136

A typology of adolescents' technology use before and during the COVID-19 pandemic: A latent profile analysis

Int J Educ Res. 2023:117:102136. doi: 10.1016/j.ijer.2023.102136. Epub 2023 Jan 3.

Authors

Tamara Kastorff^{1

2}, Michael Sailer¹, Karsten Stegmann^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Leopoldstraße 13, 80802, München.
² Centre for International Student Assessment (ZIB), TUM School of Social Sciences and Technology, Department of Educational Sciences, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany.
³ Chair of Educational Science, University of Passau, Germany.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has made adolescents´ technology use unavoidable for sustaining teaching and learning processes. In the present paper we conducted two studies using a person-centered latent profile analysis to examine adolescents' technology use before (Study 1, N = 643) and during (Study 2, N = 644) the COVID-19 pandemic in the region of Bavaria, Germany. While adolescents' technology use before the COVID-19 pandemic was divergent in terms of study-related and social technology use, the results show that during the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents' technology use increased in terms of both, study-related and social purposes. Although our results suggest that adolescents' use of technology for study-related purposes increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, adolescents from educationally disadvantaged families still appear to be at risk of being left behind by the even more rapid digitization of the COVID-19 pandemic, for which we discuss future research and targeted interventions.

Keywords: COVID - 19 pandemic; Digital divide; Latent profile analysis; Secondary education; Technology use.