Bottom-up Technology Transmission Within Families: Exploring How Youths Influence Their Parents' Digital Media Use With Dyadic Data

Abstract

This study investigated the bottom-up technology transmission process in a country with varied levels of technology diffusion, such as Chile. It explored to what extent children teach their parents how to use digital media and proposed a typology of factors related to this process. By relying on a mixed-methods design—which combined interviews with an original survey—and dyadic data, it found that the transmission occurs for all the technologies investigated, although children's influence should not be overstated. This process was more likely to occur among women and people from lower socioeconomic status, and it was also associated with less authoritarian parents and more fluid parent–child interactions.