The Digital Maturity Inventory (DIMI) developed by the EU-funded DIGYMATEX Project was presented at the 19th General Meeting of the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), which took place from June 30th – July 4th, 2023, in Kraków, Poland.
DIGYMATEX researchers Franziska Laaber and Teresa Koch from the University of Vienna participated in the conference and presented their latest research findings on young people’s digital maturity.
In her talk titled “Socioeconomic status and parental mediation relate to the use of digital devices by adolescents in ways which promote individual development”, Koch outlined how adolescents’ mature use of digital devices can differ in relation to their socioeconomic background and parental strategies to influence adolescents’ use behaviour.
The talk was based on latest work, in which Koch and her colleagues applied the DIMI and found that children from higher socioeconomic backgrounds have higher levels of digital maturity, which can be explained in part by greater parental support for technology use (Koch et al., paper under review).
In addition, Laaber presented a poster titled “Young People’s Digital Maturity: Development and Initial Validation of the Digital Maturity Inventory (DIMI)”. The poster summarized their work on developing the DIMI as a new measure to study adolescents’ digital maturity, which has recently been published in Computers in Human Behavior (Laaber et al., 2023).
The DIMI is currently available in English, German, Danish, Dutch, Slovakian, and Greek and will soon be available in other languages. Click here to learn more about it.
“Digital maturity can be summarized as comprising three core elements of using technology in a mature way: Being digitally mature means I can make autonomous decisions in digital contexts, I know how to effectively and safely use technology for my goals, and I am socially responsible and emotionally stable when interacting with others online,” said Laaber.
“The EASP has been a great opportunity for us to share our work on the development of the DIMI and to invite other researchers to use our measure in their research on young people’s healthy use of technology.”
The DIMI scale was developed and validated by DIGYMATEX researchers from the University of Vienna and Aarhus University and it proved to be a reliable and valid measure to study young people’s digital technology use.
The European Association of Social Psychology holds its general meeting every three years, which is the largest and most significant gathering for its members. It provides a unique opportunity for members to connect and discuss their recent work with a substantial portion of the membership.
The DIGYMATEX project applies an interdisciplinary, multi-method approach by integrating and connecting expertise, methods, and knowledge from different research areas such as business management, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, media and information systems.