Exploratory study on explanations and theories of how Telecentres and other community-based e-Inclusion actors operate and have an impact on digital and social inclusion policy goals

This report includes the results of the research project ‘Exploratory study on explanations and theories of how Telecentres and other community-based e-Inclusion actors operate and have an impact on digital and social inclusion policy goals’. This study was commissioned by IPTS to feed into a forthcoming 2-year research project: Measuring the impact of eInclusion actors on Digital Literacy, Skills and Inclusion goals (MIREIA). The literature review presented in this report was designed to capture the theories and explanations represented in the existing body of research in order to: provide a comprehensive and multidisciplinary landscape on theories and analytical frameworks; analyze the value of these theories and analytical frameworks based on predefined criteria and; Develop recommendations on the most promising theoretical pillars that could inform the future research mentioned above. A two-phase research approach was designed: 1) An extended mapping of the literature from the last ten years in which over 100 articles, reports and books were reviewed, coded and identified the most dominant and/or common explanations in relation to the work of e-Inclusion actors; and 2) a selection, categorization, and in-depth coding of these explanations vis-à-vis different impact areas, as well as in relation to institutional capacity. As a conclusion it has been noted that although a lot of the research on eInclusion is set out to measure impacts, in reality studies often end up with some measures of usage and analysis of why expected impacts were not achieved. In addition, there is a large proportion of available literature on telecenters and other such eInclusion actors which is based more on perceived potential than on demonstrated fact and highly contextualized studies, making it difficult to identify valid or reliable trends. These findings will be taken into account in the development of the different tasks of the MIREIA project