Research by the University’s Technology and Social Change Research Centre (TaSC) is featured on the Department of Communities and Local Government web-based Digital Inclusion mapping tool.

The site, Community Maps: Digital and Social Geographies of Great Britain (www.gps.communities.gov.uk/DigitalInclusion/), is intended to support the national digital inclusion agenda. It allows local authority and partnership users to understand patterns of social and digital disadvantage across the UK. This ground-breaking local analysis will then help to underpin local initiatives that tackle social and digital exclusion.

The TaSC data looks estimates the local geographical distribution of household internet access in 2001-02 and 2005-06. It also shows local patterns of the amount of time spent at work and on the internet by members of British households in 2000.

Ben Anderson, Director of TaSC, explains: ‘This is an excellent opportunity to showcase our work on developing ways to estimate small area distributions of household expenditure on a range of goods and services, as well as indicators of income, health and social/civic well-being. The estimates of internet access were based on spatial microsimulation of Census 2001 and ONS Expenditure and Food Survey data whilst the time-use estimates used the ONS Time Use Survey 2000.’

This research was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Using Time-Use Data to Analyse Macro and Microsocial Change in an e-Society project (RES-341-25-0004).

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Notes to editors:
TaSC is a research centre within the Institute for Social and Technical Research at the University of Essex. Predominantly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, the European Commission, UK Government Departments and industrial partners, TaSC focuses on studying the interactions between technology and social change from an empirical social science perspective.