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Youth Empowerment in Albania through ICT:
An Assessment of ICT Access, Usage and Knowledge
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Master’s Thesis Information Studies (Human Centered Multimedia) University of Amsterdam, Faculty of Science
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Author: Maaike Fleuren (10350470)
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Final version: July 22, 2014
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________________________________ ________________________________First examiner: Second examiner:
Dr. ing. S.C.J. (Sander) Bakkes Dr. F.M. (Frank) Nack
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Youth Empowerment in Albania through ICT:
An Assessment of ICT Access, Usage and Knowledge
Master’s Thesis
Maaike Fleuren
MSc Information Studies: Human Centered Multimedia Faculty of Science
University of Amsterdam The Netherlands
maaike.fleuren@student.uva.nl
ABSTRACT
This study assesses the current situation regarding ICT access, usage and knowledge among youth in Albania of age 14 to 24. The assessment is made by means of a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The results of this study contribute towards the development of an ICT platform for the empowerment of Albanian youth. Some of the key findings are that almost all youth have access to and make use of computers and internet, but one in five youths can only access and use the internet through a mobile phone. Collaboration is mostly done using social media, with Facebook being the most popular social network in general. Despite using internet frequently, the knowledge of what the internet has to o↵er is limited. They therefore tend to limit themselves to only a few of the possibilities of the internet, particularly Facebook, YouTube, Google, Skype and WhatsApp.
Categories and Subject Descriptors
K.4 [Computers and Society]: General
General Terms
Human Factors, Measurement
Keywords
ICT, internet, Albania, development, youth, access, us-age, knowledge, survey.
1. INTRODUCTION
In a study conducted for UNICEF, it appears that the vast majority of the youth is optimistic about the future of Albania. However, the youth feel that their opinion is not considered by the local government [3]. Also, according to a report for the Council of Europe, the Albanian authorities do not convincingly acknowledge the youth to be a priority [9]. Despite the youth’s posi-tive attitude regarding Albania’s future, more than half have indicated that they would prefer to live in an other
country when grown up [3]. The reason might be that Albania is one of the poorest countries in Europe and su↵ers from a high level of corruption [7, 8].
As a part of their Youth Program, World Vision Albania (WVA) has started a project that aims to set a move-ment in motion where the youth actively address the problems that their country faces. The goal of WVA’s Youth Program is “to create space for youth to express themselves freely, build their competencies and skills, and help them grow up to becoming agents of change that contribute actively in social and economic life and advocate for the most vulnerable.” [11, p. 4].
The project’s purpose is to build an ICT platform that will empower the youth of Albania. The platform should facilitate their needs, which might include discussing, sharing knowledge and raising issues of common con-cern. Given the rapid development of ICT in Albania and the lack of detailed information as to how ICT is being used by the youth (see section 3.1), it is important to better understand the ICT development in Albania. This study therefore addresses the following research questions: What is the current situation of ICT with regards to 1) access, 2) usage and 3) knowledge among youth in Albania? The research question will be ad-dressed by conducting a survey among youths from 14 to 24 years of age. This age group has been selected as this is also the target age group for the ICT platform. This document describes the context of the research and the research question in section 1 and gives a further specification of the research scope in section 2. Related work is discussed in section 3. The methods that are used will be subsequently discussed in section 4, fol-lowed by the research results in section 5. A discussion will follow in section 6, with a conclusion, recommen-dations for the platform and a direction for future work in section 7.
2. RESEARCH SCOPE
To gain information specifically relevant to the plat-form, the topics of the research questions have been broken down into categories. These categories form the scope of this study and are defined as follows:
• Access
– Location & devices • Usage
– Meta-level
⇤ Location & devices ⇤ Frequency
⇤ Language ⇤ Freedom of use – Activities
⇤ Communication ⇤ Information & learning
⇤ Professional life & civic participation ⇤ Leisure
• Knowledge
– Experience & skills
Access
The category access includes whether and where the youth have access to a computer and internet. In ad-dition, it includes from which devices the youth access internet. This information is important for determin-ing the potential reach, includdetermin-ing possible limitations, of the ICT platform.
Usage
Usage is the broadest category and is also the most important part of the study as it allows to increase the compatibility of the ICT platform with current usage of ICT. As the platform will likely be web based, the overall focus is on internet usage as opposed to usage of other types of ICTs.
The first subcategory of usage includes whether, where and with which frequency youth use a computer and internet, from which devices internet is used, in what language they usually use internet and to what extent they feel free to use the internet. These are all mea-sured to understand if they form any limits to potential features of the ICT platform. For example, when many youths use mobile devices, this will likely have implica-tions due to the screen resolution and language might limit the integration with existing platforms.
The second subcategory is mostly concerned with what the youth do on the internet. This includes what social media websites they use and what they do on social media, how they communicate with friends and family, to what extent they prepare for their future using the internet, for what purposes they search for information and what type of information they use or share in their free time. By understanding what the youth do on the internet and how it is used, the ICT platform can be
designed to be integrated with the already existing ac-tivities and to have similarities with widely used appli-cations. It also gives an understanding to what extent certain activities, which will potentially be facilitated by the ICT platform, are already being performed.
Knowledge
The last category knowledge is concerned with how fa-miliar the youth is with using the internet to determine the level of complexity that they are able to comprehend when developing the ICT platform.
3. RELATED WORK
This section is divided in two parts. First an analysis is made of existing literature concerning Albanian youth and ICT. The second part discusses existing method-ology for measuring ICT access, usage and knowledge, and how these are used in this study.
3.1 Albanian youth & ICT
The research that has been done on Albanian youth related to ICT is limited. Currently, three large-scale surveys have been conducted in which ICT access and usage was one of the topics. The first was conducted in 2007 by the Institute for Development Research and Alternatives (IDRA) [3], the second in 2011 by the Al-banian Media Institute (AMI) [1] and the third in 2014 by World Vision Albania (WVA) [10].
The research by IDRA [3] was based on a questionnaire that was answered by 2240 children between 9 and 17 years of age in di↵erent areas across the country. The findings were that only 23.4% of the children had a com-puter at home, of which only 35.2% had an internet connection, and that computers were mostly used for games (73.8%). Of those with an internet connection at home, 12.8% used the internet on a daily basis. The situation in Albania had been changing rapidly, as four years later the study by AMI [1] found that 81.4% of the youth use the internet at least once per day; mostly from home, but also by using a mobile phone or in an internet center. The most popular use of the inter-net is for social media, followed by entertainment and information. As much as 88.2% of the youths are reg-istered on social networks, of which the majority views their profile daily. However, as all 500 participants (age 13-18) of this study live in Tirana, the capital city of Albania, these findings only represent Albanian youth living in an urban environment.
The most recent study on Albanian youth and ICT, conducted by WVA in 2014 [10], asked 900 participants across the country between 13 and 17 years about on-line safety. The study found that 84% of the youth have internet access at home and that 63% spend at least one hour on internet each day. Youths start using the in-ternet at age 14 on average. The most popular use of
the internet is to read information related to school, fol-lowed by social media, chatting, playing games, watch-ing videos and readwatch-ing articles for fun. Furthermore, there is a large di↵erence in social network account own-ership between females (61%) and males (95%). Con-cerning online safety, 47% of the participants have been contacted by an unknown individual in the last year and 45% copes with issues such as online bullying, password theft or unsolicited exposure to pornographic material every day. Overall, 58% of the participants feel pro-tected while using the internet.
Each year, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) publishes a report on their website on ICT de-velopment across the globe [4]. The most recent report states that in 2012, 20.0% of the Albanian households have a computer at home and 20.5% of the households have internet access. Of the Albanian youth (age 15-24), 87.4% uses the internet and 34.1% is a so-called digital native, meaning that the person has at least five years of experience with the internet.
From the studies, it seems that a rapid increase in ac-cess to and the use of computers and internet has taken place in Albania. What can also be observed is the widespread and regular use of social networks. The first three studies mentioned above provide some infor-mation about computer and internet usage, but this is very limited and knowledge or skills are not mentioned. As described earlier, part of this study is to gain better insight into the usage and knowledge of computers and internet of the youth in Albania. Also, this study aims to gain a more current insight into the status of ICT access, given the rapid change in previous years.
3.2 Measuring ICT access, usage &
knowl-edge
There have been several initiatives to standardize the way ICT access, usage and knowledge are measured. Various organizations have developed comprehensive man-uals on how to approach such a research. As few of them have an explicit focus on individuals (as opposed to en-terprises) and are relatively recent, only two of these will be discussed: the ITU and Eurostat standardiza-tions [2, 5].
The most notable aspect of the ITU standardization [5] is that they work with a list of core indicators. A core indicator represents a measurement topic, such as the ‘proportion of individuals using the internet’. Each in-dicator is clearly defined, with a clarification on the measurement and example questions also being pro-vided. Based on this list of indicators, a model ques-tionnaire is constructed.
A di↵erent approach is taken by the Eurostat standard-ization [2]. Eurostat simply provides a model question-naire that is thoroughly explained. The questionquestion-naire
consists of seven modules, each covering di↵erent top-ics. The topics include access to ICTs, use of internet and e-skills.
When comparing both model questionnaires, it becomes clear that they each have a slightly di↵erent focus. How-ever, the di↵erence in the focus of this study compared to that of both models is even greater, given the context of youth and the eventual goal of building an ICT plat-form for them. Therefore, these standards will merely be used as a guideline.
4. METHODS
The assessment of the current ICT access, usage and knowledge among the Albanian youth (age 14-24) is done by conducting a survey in which both interviews and questionnaires are used. By using both methods, and thus applying methodological triangulation, a higher degree of validity is achieved. In order to reach di↵erent youths across the country, the large network of WVA is utilized. WVA has eleven di↵erent Area Development Programs (ADPs) with field offices situated in urban as well as rural areas.
In order to collect information about all categories men-tioned in section 2, a questionnaire in Albanian was dis-tributed by the ADPs amongst the youth in their pro-grams. This provided access to a wide audience with a large spread across the country. Given the limitation of closed questions due to the large expected amount of responses and the fact that translating them was not feasible, interviews were held to gain more depth. As the interviews were concluded before the question-naire was distributed, adjustments to the questionquestion-naire were made based on insights gained from the interviews. Therefore, the interviews will first be discussed in sec-tion 4.1, followed by the quessec-tionnaire in secsec-tion 4.2.
4.1 Interviews
The main purpose of the interviews was to get an in-depth insight in ICT access, usage and knowledge among youth in Albania. It enabled youth to give answers be-yond the options given in the questionnaire and explain how and why they do certain things concerning these subjects. The majority of the questions were about us-age, as in most cases access and knowledge could be deduced from the responses.
The interviews were semi-structured consisting of 12 predefined questions, which took about 20 minutes for each participant. The interview team consisted of three people: an interviewer, a note taker and a translator. The interviewer was a co-researcher who was also in-volved with the development of the ICT platform. He was appointed this task due to his eloquence, result-ing in better follow-up questions and thus more depth. Furthermore, a translator was needed as most Albani-ans do not speak English and the interviewer as well as
the note taker could not speak Albanian.
Prior to the interview the interviewees were informed about the purpose of the study, the purpose of the video and voice recordings, the privacy and data policy and that participation is completely voluntary. Participants were also given the option to opt out of being recorded. The interview consisted of one question about the de-vices that a participant uses to access the internet, a question which requested the interviewee to reflect on his or her skills with computers and internet and several questions about usage of computers, internet and social media. Further information about access and knowl-edge was deduced from the responses to the questions about usage. The interviewer was instructed to ask follow-up questions to gain more depth of information, especially if answers from interviewees were shallow.
4.2 Questionnaire
After the interview sessions were completed, the ques-tionnaire was finalized with a number of changes based on insights gained from the interviews. Prior to distri-bution the questionnaire was translated to Albanian. It was made available online as well as on print.
The questionnaire consisted of 53 questions, which were all close-ended due to the language barrier in combina-tion with the expected number of responses. Half of the questions used the following ordinal scale: once or sev-eral times per day, once or sevsev-eral times per week, once or several times per month, less than once per month, never. This ordinal scale is less prone to subjectivity compared to a scale with very often, often etc. Other questions were of type multiple select, select one or five-point Likert scale.
The questionnaire was divided in seven parts: About Me
This part consisted of questions about demographics and asked about age, gender, occupation, place of res-idence (to determine urban/rural) and proficiency in reading and writing Albanian and English.
Access and Usage
In the access and usage part of the questionnaire, ques-tions were asked about where respondents use and have access to computers and internet, how often they use computers and internet and on which devices they use and have access to internet. These are followed by sev-eral questions about freedom of use: whether they can use internet (i) whenever they want, (ii) as long as they want and (iii) whether they can do what they want on internet. In addition, participants were asked (iv) how often they use it alone. The section is concluded with a question about the frequency of visiting websites in Albanian and English.
The questions from the access and usage part of the questionnaire correspond to the access category and the meta-level categories of usage as described in section 2. Communication
The questions in this part concerned social media and how it is used, communication with friends and relatives and collaboration using ICT.
From the interviews it seemed that, rather than being used for sharing content and updates, Skype was used for direct communication (i.e. voice calls and chat) and YouTube was only used for watching videos. Skype and YouTube were therefore not regarded as social media in the questionnaire.
Information
This part of the questionnaire consisted of questions about the frequency with which respondents search for or use di↵erent types of information. The first five ques-tions in this part were concerned with orientation on career and education. These were followed by three questions about the frequency with which respondents search for information related to school or work, per-sonal interests and practical information, and three ques-tions about frequency of using a search engine, reading or watching tutorials and reading news online.
Leisure
The first three questions of this part inquired with which frequency respondents viewed leisure related content. These were followed by two questions about the fquency with which respondents published leisure re-lated content.
Experience
For the experience part of the questionnaire, which cor-responds with the knowledge category described in sec-tion 2, the participants were asked to self-reflect on their level of skill for eleven di↵erent activities. These were more or less in order of complexity. For the judgement of level of skill, the following ordinal scale was used: I know how to do this, I could figure out by myself how to do this, I would have to search on Google how to do this, I would not be able to do this. The questions, in the form of stated activities, were:
1. Upload a photo to Facebook 2. Join a group on Facebook 3. Create a group on Facebook
4. Create a (public) event on Facebook 5. Visit a channel on YouTube
6. Upload a video on YouTube
7. Add tags or hashtags to content on the internet 8. Edit a document online (e.g. Google Drive) 9. Edit a Wikipedia article
10. Write HTML code
Figure 1: Age distribution of the questionnaire sample (N = 416)
Half of the knowledge questions concern activities on either Facebook or YouTube, as it became clear from the interviews that these are by far the most popular and widely used websites (apart from Google) among youth in Albania (see also section 5.3).
5. RESULTS
The results of both the interviews and the questionnaire have been combined into one integrated outcome for the categories access (section 5.1), usage (section 5.2) and knowledge (section 5.3). All statistical tests were performed on the entire sample (N = 416) unless stated otherwise (denoted by n), are two-tailed and use ↵ = 0.05. Furthermore, 2 denotes the chi-squared value,
U the Mann-Whitney U value and rs the Spearman’s
rank correlation coefficient.
Demographics
The interviews were conducted with 33 youths at five di↵erent ADPs well distributed over Albania. The mean age of the participants was 18.1 (s = 3.63), with 45.5% being male and 54.5% female, and 75.8% living in urban and 24.2% in rural areas. Interviewees were recruited locally by ADP employees amongst youth who partic-ipate in their programs. Furthermore, 23 interviews were held in ADP offices, 6 were held in a community center and 4 at an ADP employee’s home. The mean duration of the interviews was 21.4 minutes (s = 4.6, min = 13, max = 30).
The questionnaire received a total of 1432 responses, of which 416 remained after filtering for quality and completeness. Given the population in this age group of approximately half a million, the number of responses result in a confidence level of 95% and a margin of error of 4.80%.
The 416 responses of the questionnaire came from ten di↵erent ADPs and the respondents had a mean age of 16.5 (s = 1.85). The age distribution of the sample can be seen in figure 1. Of the respondents, 159 were males (38.2%) and 257 were females (61.8%), and 211 lived in urban (50.7%) and 205 lived in rural areas (49.3%). In comparison, the overall youth population (age 15-24) consists of 52.4% males and 47.6% females, with 60.0% living in urban and 40.0% in rural areas [6]. Also, 394 respondents were student (94.7%), 12 were student as well as employed (2.9%), 7 were employed (1.7%) and 2 were unemployed (0.5%). Only 7.5% of the question-naires were filled out online versus 92.5% on paper.
5.1 Access
The majority of the youths have access to a computer (99.3%) and to internet (99.8%). That is, access in at least one location in their environment, i.e. either at home, at school or anywhere else. Note that ‘in-ternet access’ includes all types of in‘in-ternet connections (e.g. home connection, mobile internet, internet cen-ters, public Wi-Fi etc.).
At home, 73.8% have access to a computer and 76.7% have access to internet, with significantly more urban youths having access than rural youths (computer: 2(1) =
13.192, p < 0.001, %urban = 81.5, %rural = 65.9;
in-ternet: 2(1) = 10.845, p = 0.001, %
urban = 83.4,
%rural= 69.8). Note that access to internet at home is
higher than access to a computer at home as some only have access to mobile internet at home. In fact, 19.0% of the youths indicate that the only way of accessing the internet is through a mobile phone, which is a large por-tion of the total number of youth (48.3%) that have ac-cess to internet on a mobile phone. Rural youths report more often than urban youths that they have access to internet exclusively through a mobile phone. How-ever, this di↵erence is not significant ( 2(1) = 1.607,
p = 0.205, %urban= 16.6, %rural= 21.5). Significantly
more males have access to internet on a mobile phone than females ( 2(1) = 10.667, p = 0.001, %
male= 58.5,
%f emale= 42.0).
Of the students, 16.3% have access to a computer and 14.8% have access to internet at school. Remarkably, significantly more students from rural areas have access to a computer and internet at school compared with students from urban areas (computer: 2(1, n = 406) =
17.733, p < 0.001, %urban = 8.5, %rural = 23.4;
inter-net: 2(1, n = 406) = 5.776, p = 0.016, %
urban= 10.4,
%rural= 18.5). The reason for this might be that in
ru-ral areas it is more needed for schools to have computers and internet as significantly less youths have access to these at home compared with urban areas.
Other locations where participants have access to inter-net are: interinter-net center (24.5%), public Wi-Fi (14.7%), someone else’s home (11.3%), library (1.2%) and work
(31.6% of the 19 employed participants). Other de-vices from which participants have access to internet are: computer (78.1%), with 40.9% having access on a desktop and 50.0% on a laptop, and tablet (11.8%).
5.1.1 Key Findings
Nearly all youths have access to a computer and inter-net. Half of the youths have access to internet through a mobile phone and for one in five youths, the mo-bile phone is the only way they have access to internet. Around three out of four have access to a computer and internet at home. Significantly more urban than rural youths have access to a computer and internet at home.
5.2 Usage
This subsection is divided in eight parts, one for each subcategory of usage. This will be concluded with a general summary for the usage category.
5.2.1 Location & Devices
The numbers concerning whether and where the youth used computers and internet in the last month, and from which devices they used internet, are similar to the numbers for computer and internet access: 99.3% used a computer, 99.5% used internet, 74.0% used a computer at home, 77.4% used internet at home, 52.9% used in-ternet on a mobile phone, 19.2% used inin-ternet only on a mobile phone, 9.6% used internet on a tablet, 79.1% used internet on a computer (40.9% desktop, 52.2% lap-top) and 24.3% used internet at an internet center. Notable gender di↵erences were found regarding inter-net usage in an interinter-net center or at a public location with (free) Wi-Fi. Significantly more males use inter-net at these locations compared with females (inter-net center: 2(1) = 7.192, p = 0.007, %
male = 31.4,
%f emale = 19.8; public Wi-Fi: 2(1) = 11.878, p =
0.001, %male= 21.4, %f emale= 9.3).
Note that some percentages are slightly higher than the corresponding access percentage. This and the high similarity between access and usage will be discussed in section 6.
5.2.2 Frequency
Similarly, there is a clear di↵erence in frequency of use when comparing gender. Male respondents use com-puters and internet significantly more often than fe-males (computer: U = 17631.0, p = 0.004; internet: U = 17745.0, p = 0.001). No significant di↵erence has been found in frequency of use when comparing ur-ban with rural (computer: 19993.0, p = 0.106; internet: U = 201845, p = 0.096). Overall, 87.5% of the youths use a computer at least once per week and 67.8% use it daily. Internet is used by 92.1% of all the youths at least once per week, with 79.3% using it on a daily basis.
5.2.3 Language
When asked during the interviews whether the partici-pant prefers to search for information in English or Al-banian, the few who were proficient enough in English preferred English information due to its wide availabil-ity. However, most participants struggle with English and therefore prefer to look up information in Alba-nian, supplementing missing information from English sources, often using Google Translate to understand dif-ficult words. This is affirmed by the quantitative data, as a moderate positive correlation can be found between indicated proficiency in reading and writing English and how often they visit websites in English, which is sta-tistically significant (rs = 0.381, p < 0.001).
Over-all, 54.1% visits websites in Albanian more often than websites in English, 30.8% equally often and 15.1% less often.
5.2.4 Freedom of Use
In all four questions about freedom of use (see section 4.2), a significant di↵erence was found in gender, with males reporting a higher freedom of use than females (i: U = 17738.0, p = 0.019; ii: U = 15981.5, p < 0.001; iii: U = 15528.5, p < 0.001; iv: U = 17306.0, p = 0.005). Of all participants, 38.9% report that they cannot do what they want on internet, 30.0% report that they cannot use the internet as long as they want and 20.4% report that they cannot use the internet whenever they want. The majority (82.0%) reports to either always or mostly use internet alone. From the interviews it appears that it is not common for youths to have their own computer and that oftentimes, if they do have a computer at home, computers are shared with siblings and/or parents.
Interestingly, six participants from the interview ses-sions indicated they were afraid of getting addicted to internet and therefore use it only when necessary, e.g. for school. Two of these were also concerned about internet safety, e.g. sexual predators and unsolicited exposure to pornographic material.
5.2.5 Communication
The questionnaire results reveal the popularity of Face-book, with 82.7% using it at least once per week and 72.1% every day. Only 8.9% indicates to never use it. This compares with Twitter with 56.0% and LinkedIn with 82.2% of the participants never using it. Males use Facebook significantly more often than females (U = 15279.0, p < 0.001). On social media, 46.2% shares up-dates and 56.5% comment on upup-dates from others at least once per week.
The most popular way of having conversations with friends and family is by phone calls (80.5% at least weekly), followed by online chat (79.1% at least weekly), phone messages (65.4% at least weekly) and through Skype or Viber (54.6% at least weekly). In the
inter-views some participants indicated that they use Skype to keep in touch with relatives abroad. Furthermore, online chat is used significantly more often by males than by females (U = 15632.0, p < 0.001).
For collaboration, most youths use social media (57.7%), followed by Skype (45.9%), e-mail (36.5%), and just a few use Google Drive (8.7%), USB (7.5%) and Dropbox (2.6%). In addition, 4.1% wrote ‘phone’ in the ‘other’ option. The interviews have shown that the most com-mon way to collaborate is through Facebook groups. Only 7.2% indicates to use no technology whatsoever for collaboration. Some interviewees indicated that they prefer to meet face-to-face, especially those who live in a small village.
5.2.6 Information & Learning
At least once per week, 81.3% of the participants use a search engine, for school or work (74.5%), for personal interests (70.9%) and for practical information (63.5%). Half of the respondents (50.5%) make use of tutorials or to’s on internet at least weekly. Popular how-to video how-topics on YouTube that were mentioned by interviewees are cooking and hair styling. One of the participants indicated that she had learned how to take care of her baby through YouTube how-to videos. Again, significant di↵erences have been found in gen-der and in urban versus rural. Males search for per-sonal interests and practical information significantly more often than females, as do urban respondents more than rural respondents (gender & personal interests: U = 14540.5, p < 0.001; gender & practical informa-tion: U = 17122.5, p = 0.004; urban/rural & personal interests: U = 18253.5, p = 0.003; urban/rural & prac-tical information: U = 17723.0, p = 0.001).
Furthermore, males make use of a search engine and tutorials significantly more often than females, as do urban respondents more than rural respondents (gen-der & search engine: U = 15887.5, p < 0.001; gen(gen-der & tutorials: U = 16122.0 < 0.001, p; urban/rural & search engines: U = 17921.5, p = 0.001; urban/rural & tutorials: U = 17274.5, p < 0.001).
5.2.7 Professional Life & Civic Participation
Many of the youths use the internet to orient them-selves and prepare for their future. About half of the respondents indicate to orient themselves for their ca-reer (51.7%) and prepare for their caca-reer (47.1%) at least once per week. Also, 40.9% of the respondents, including those who are already in university or work-ing, indicate to orient for tertiary education at least weekly. However, only 13.2% looks for job vacancies online with the same frequency. It is not clear whether this is due to the lack of job advertising online or due to the low amount of job seekers in the sample given their age.
Reading the news is done by 46.2% of the respondents at least once per week, though males read it significantly more often than females (U = 15600.0, p < 0.001). Of the interviewees that were asked whether they dis-cuss politics online, all indicated to have no interest whatsoever in politics. One participant said: “Only the children whose parents are politicians are interested in politics.” Of the questionnaire respondents, 43.5% have indicated to have discussions online at least once per week. Again, males do this significantly more of-ten than females (U = 12969.5, p < 0.001). Female interviewees indicated that they prefer to discuss on-line privately (e.g. in a chat conversation) or face-to-face, often about school related topics. Among males, the most popular discussion topic is sports, particularly football, mostly in the form of opinionated responses to a Facebook update.
5.2.8 Leisure
The majority of the interviewees indicated using YouTube mostly for music. Those who were asked whether they had ever uploaded a video to YouTube indicated that they had never done so before. In addition, all par-ticipants were asked whether they publish or want to publish content to the internet, other than on social me-dia. Interestingly enough, eight participants indicated that they would like to publish their creative work (e.g. poems, paintings, songs), but have never done this be-fore simply because they have never thought about it. One participant indicated that she sometimes posts her poems on a national poetry blog.
Of the questionnaire respondents, 46.2% have indicated to share their creative work at least once per month, with males doing so significantly more often than fe-males (U = 16384.5, p < 0.001). Another 29.6% writes a blog article at least once per month. Again, males do this significantly more often than females (U = 15859.5, p < 0.001). Reading blog articles is done by 43.3% at least once per month.
5.2.9 Key Findings
To summarize, a large majority of the youths use inter-net on a daily basis and almost all youths have used a computer and internet within the last month. Further-more, youths often have to share a computer with other members of the household and two out of five youths feel they are restricted to do what they want when using the internet. Males report a higher frequency and freedom of use than females. Also, four out of five youths use a search engine at least weekly. The few youths who are proficient enough to do so, prefer to search for informa-tion in English. However, the majority struggles with English and use it only to supplement the information available in Albanian, often with the help of Google Translate.
Figure 2: Results of the knowledge questions of the questionnaire.
Facebook being the most popular social network with four out of five using it at least weekly. However, phone calls remain the preferred means of communication with friends and family. Furthermore, around half of the youths use internet at least once per week to orient themselves and prepare for their career. Reading news online is done by half of the youths at least once per week and reading blog articles is done by two out of five at least once per month. Publishing blog articles is done by one in three youths at least once per month and about half of the youths publish creative work with the same frequency. Youths who make creative work but have not published it online indicate that they are interested to do so. In general, males are more active online than females.
5.3 Knowledge
In this category, the participants of the questionnaire were asked to self-reflect on their internet skills. The results are shown in figure 2. The corresponding ques-tions and explanation of the scale can be found in sec-tion 4.2. As expected, participants are confident about their skill level with regards to activities that most of them already do on a regular basis, such as uploading a photo to Facebook or visiting a YouTube channel. However, when activities get just slightly more com-plex, their confidence in being able to perform the ac-tivity drops. Although there are no figures available for making a comparison with youth from other countries, it seems that the youth in Albania has the tendency to find a task difficult when it becomes slightly more com-plex. If this is true, a possible cause might be the lack of information in the Albanian language, thus making exploring the possibilities of the internet more difficult. With the exception of question 5 (i.e. visit a channel on YouTube), males report a significantly higher skill level than females in all questions (question 1: U = 17872.5,
p = 0.001; question 2: U = 17945.0, p = 0.005; question 3: U = 16811.5, p = 0.001; question 4: U = 15458.0, p < 0.001; question 6: U = 14788.0, p < 0.001; question 7: U = 16100.0, p < 0.001; question 8: U = 15788.0, p < 0.001; question 9: U = 15357.0, p < 0.001; question 10: U = 17432.5, p = 0.008; question 11: U = 17379.5, p = 0.005).
Also, participants from urban areas report a signifi-cantly higher skill level than participants from rural areas in all questions (question 1: U = 19056.0, p = 0.001; question 2: U = 18380.0, p < 0.001; question 3: U = 16497.5, p < 0.001; question 4: U = 16580.5, p < 0.001; question 5: U = 17960.5, p < 0.001; question 6: U = 17036.5, p < 0.001; question 7: U = 17725.0, p = 0.001; question 8: U = 18142.5, p = 0.003; question 9: U = 18233.0, p = 0.004; question 10: U = 18462.0, p = 0.006; question 11: U = 18371.5, p = 0.010). In the interviews, 14 participants believed themselves to be skilled enough with computers and internet, 13 participants felt to not be skilled enough and 11 partic-ipants indicated that they need to learn more. However, it became clear that their judgement of level of skill was highly subjective and in most cases seemed to contra-dict answers given earlier in the interview. For exam-ple, one participant who seemed well educated and even knew JavaScript and C++ indicated to find himself not to be skilled enough.
From the interviews, it appeared that generally youths do not seem to be aware of the broad possibilities of the internet and therefore do not make use of them. The majority of the interviewees indicated that they mostly use Facebook, YouTube, Google, Skype and WhatsApp, and that they are not familiar with Q&A platforms (e.g. Yahoo! Answers) or collaboration supporting platforms (e.g. Google Drive, Dropbox). Of the nine participants who indicated that they knew or use Wikipedia, only one came from a rural area. Regarding these findings, no di↵erences were observed in gender and age.
5.3.1 Key Findings
A slight increase in complexity of activities causes a de-crease in the confidence of the youth in the ability to perform the activity, with males reporting a higher abil-ity to perform activities than females do. From the in-terviews it seemed that youth in Albania have a limited awareness of the possibilities of the internet and tend to limit themselves to Facebook, Google, YouTube, Skype and WhatsApp. This shows a clear e↵ect of branding.
6. DISCUSSION
In order to reach youths from di↵erent areas, the net-work of WVA was utilized. Therefore, the sample can-not be regarded as random and is in fact a sample of convenience. This might have caused a bias, as ADPs are situated in certain locations where development is
required, such as poor rural and marginal peri-urban areas, and the youths in the ADPs receive assistance that other youths do not.
Also, WVA mostly works with youth until the age of 18. As a result, the age group of 19 to 24 is under-represented in the questionnaire sample. It is therefore possible that the results cannot be generalized to the entire youth population of age 14 to 24. Despite be-ing aware of WVA’s limited reach to young adults, the decision was made to include as many as possible as they could play an important role in youth empower-ment and will therefore be included in the target group for the ICT platform as well.
Furthermore, as both the interviewer and the note taker could not speak or understand Albanian, WVA has pro-vided one of their employees to function as a transla-tor. This employee was not specifically trained in this area, but was adequately proficient in both Albanian and English and had a communications background. As a result, the responses of interviewees were mostly sum-marized instead of being translated per sentence. It is likely that this has resulted, to some extent, in an in-formation loss. Also, the employee freely translated the interview questions, sometimes adding examples or ex-planations to make the questions more clear. This may have biased the answers of the interviewees, though ex-amples and further explanation did seem necessary for most participants to understand the questions. For ex-ample, some did not understand the term ‘social media’ until presented with Facebook as one of the examples. The language barrier may have a↵ected the question-naire as well. There seemed to be no clear di↵erence between access and usage in the questions about lo-cations and devices after they had been translated to Albanian. While going through the filled out question-naires, it was noted that in these questions some respon-dents have interpreted access as usage and visa versa. Also, surprisingly many respondents filled in the same answers for both, while one would expect that most people have access at more locations than they actually use. However, it is also possible they actually do make use of all means they have access to. These possible misinterpretations may be the cause of the results of the relevant questions being similar and sometimes re-sulting in higher percentages of usage than access (see sections 5.1 and 5.2.1 respectively).
However, the aforementioned inconsistencies in the ac-cess and usage questions about locations and devices may also be the result of casual responses, as it was noted that the overall quality of the questionnaire re-sponses was poor. For example, many of the rere-sponses were found to contain strong symptoms of either slop-piness or unwillingness (e.g. zigzag patterns or incom-pleteness), or were clearly inconsistent in the answers
that were given. The context in which the question-naires were distributed are unknown, as this was done by WVA employees at the ADPs. For example, it could be possible that youths were asked to fill out the ques-tionnaires after a long and tiring day and did not have adequate energy left to fill them out seriously. For this reason, the decision was made to choose quality over quantity. All questionnaires that had the aforemen-tioned characteristics were filtered out. However, this filtering process could have introduced a bias. Never-theless, the sample is large enough to be representative for the population.
Lastly, it should be noted that the knowledge questions of the questionnaire were the final ones out of a total of 53 questions. Many responses in this category seemed to show signs of fatigue, leading to inconsistent answers when compared with the rest of the questionnaire. As it is impossible to distinguish honest responses from fa-tigued responses, no responses were discarded based on possible fatigue. Therefore, such responses might have a↵ected the reliability of the knowledge results.
7. CONCLUSIONS
The purpose of this study was to determine the current situation of ICT access, usage and knowledge among youth in Albania. The information required to answer the research questions was collected through naires and semi-structured interviews. The question-naires received 416 complete responses and interviews were conducted with 33 participants. All interviewees and respondents were in the age category of 14 to 24. In this section, the research questions are answered (sec-tion 7.1), recommenda(sec-tions are made for the ICT plat-form (section 7.2) and suggestions for future work are given (section 7.3).
7.1 Conclusion
The results allow for the following answers to the re-search questions:
The current situation of ICT access is that nearly all youths have access to a computer and internet. How-ever, one in five youths has access to internet exclusively through a mobile phone. As may be expected, more ur-ban than rural youths have access to a computer and internet at home.
The current situation of ICT usage is that most youths use computers and internet on a daily basis. In general, youth use the internet mostly in Albanian, and search in English only if the information available in Albanian is inadequate. Furthermore, the most popular tool for collaboration is social media, with Facebook being the most popular social network. However, phone calls re-main the most popular means of communicating with friends and relatives. Orienting and preparing for their
career online is done by about half of the youth on at least a weekly basis. Also, reading news online is done by about half of the youths regularly. Reading and writ-ing blog articles is done less often, with two out of five youths reading and one third of the youths writing blog articles at least once per month. Half of the youth pub-lish creative works such as poems and paintings once per month. Those who have not done so before, but do create creative work, show interest in publishing their work online. In general, males participate more actively online than females and report a higher freedom and frequency of use.
The current situation of ICT knowledge is that youth seem to have a limited awareness of the possibilities of the internet and tend to limit themselves to Facebook, Google, YouTube, Skype and WhatsApp. It seems that youths become less confident in their ability to perform activities on the internet when the activities become only slightly more complex. Also, males are more con-fident in using the internet than females.
7.2 Recommendations for the ICT Platform
Based on the findings in this study, the following rec-ommendations have been formulated for the platform. First of all, an ICT platform indeed has the potential to reach many youths from all over the country, as the majority has access to internet and uses social networks. However, it is important to have a strategy to create public awareness of its existence, as the youth do not tend to explore the web by themselves.
Furthermore, user friendliness will be a key element of the potential success of such a platform, as youths do not have a broad experience with using the web. Since most youths are familiar with Facebook, it is advisable that such a platform has similarities with Facebook. It is important to note that the ICT platform should be mobile device friendly as many youths use their phone for internet.
7.3 Future Work
The logical next step in the context of this study is to develop the ICT platform. Now that it is known what the current situation is of ICT access, usage and knowledge of the Albanian youth, this can contribute to determining their needs in terms of such a platform. Once the needs of the youth for the platform are known, the platform can be designed and built.
However, if more depth of understanding is required for ICT usage, possibly an experiment could be set up in an internet center or lab environment, where user sessions are recorded and analyzed. Similarly, for ICT knowledge, an experiment could be set up where users are asked to perform activities similar to those used for the questionnaire. By doing this in a think aloud
procedure, additional information could be gained.
8. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research would not be possible without World Vi-sion Albania. Special thanks go to Michiel Dekker, Rein Dekker, Majlinda Karameta, Jurgena Hajdaraj, Migena Shulla, Bardha Prendi and all other World Vision em-ployees that have contributed to this study. Also, thank you to Sander Bakkes and Frank Nack for the support and supervision on behalf of the University of Amster-dam.
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