Often the Digital Divide -- the gulf between those online and those who don't or can't access the Internet -- is described as one of the challenges affecting Latinos in the U.S. But everyone knows that demographic terms are broad and inexact, and that's especially true with the word "Latino," which is a catchall word for the most diverse and quickly growing demographic in the U.S.

A new series of reports from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop examines differences in digital and traditional media access inside the Latino community, finding exactly where the digital divide is most pronounced, and how it affects families on the other side.

The Latino Digital Divide: Language & Income

In "Digital Media and Latino Families," researchers looked at a broad array of surveys to get a sense of what the authors called "a blizzard of digital content for Latino children and families" available online, and which Latinos had the most access to it.

The meta-study found a narrowing digital divide between Latino and white Americans, helped, the authors found, in part by the high rate of access to smartphones -- a concept Latin Post has previously explored.

But while the overall divide for "Latinos" is perhaps narrowing, the study also found "wide differences in ownership and uses of digital technology" which tracked with "family income, immigrant status, and home language among Latino communities," along with differences in the types of devices used to access the Internet.

So, for example, while Latinos have caught up with the general U.S. population in recent years, when it comes to online access from any device, that trend was "driven mostly by native-born and English-speaking Latinos," according to the study.

The same goes for computer or tablet ownership, where English-speaking Latinos lag only a few percentage points (at 82 percent) behind white families, while less than 60 percent of Spanish-dominant households owned computers. Similar differences exist across ownership of cell phones and smartphones, and unsurprisingly, the differences are more pronounced based on income.

(Photo : Joan Ganz Cooney Center)

Television, Digital Access, Education and Authority

The recently released reports all center on the issues of children, media consumption and education, and found disparities between different Latino families' use of digital tools, television-watching habits and use of educational media.

Television remains the most dominant factor in children's' lives across the board, with lots of content available in English or Spanish. But Spanish-speaking parents report less frequent uses of new media for educational purposes. "Families were far more likely to watch educational television than they were to use educational content on other platforms (computers, video games, and mobile devices)," found the report "Aprendiendo en casa."

Even more interestingly, the use of computers and smartphones (when available) is high for all children and young Latinos, and "likely contributes to their bilingual brokering role within the family and kin network." But that generally acculturation trend, mixed with the reported lower use of digital tools for educational purposes in Spanish-dominant households, brings up a question of authority between those Latino parents and their children: When young people are the most comfortable in the household with new media, do they have more independence over what content they access than in other families?

Complicating that question are findings that Spanish-only families spend more time in "joint media engagement" (JME) -- otherwise known as watching programs with your kids -- than in English-only Latino families. A large part of this is likely due to the nature of the medium in question, or large screens versus small screens. Television, which Spanish-only Latino families are much more likely to own and use than digital devices, is more of a communal medium, and 75 percent of parents studied had engaged in JME through TV while many parents reported no JME on mobile devices.

By that measure, digital technology may be more disruptive to families and children's education for Latinos new to the Internet landscape, but once it's more common, educational uses for those new tools becomes more familiar. One thing is clear from the study though: no matter what, parents are looking for help using media to give their children a better education. Over 90 percent of Spanish-speaking families want more information on finding educational media, both old and new, as do the majority of bilingual and English-speaking Latino families.

(Photo : Joan Ganz Cooney Center)

The media and technology landscape is quite complicated these days, but especially for diverse communities that include families across the spectrum: low-income, upwardly mobile, middle-to-upper class, Spanish-only, bicultural, English-only, and so on.

Get far more details in the full text of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center's recent studies here.