EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Well-being and technology: The effect of individual laptops in high school

Sigrid Johanne Husøy and Doriane Mignon

Economics of Education Review, 2025, vol. 106, issue C

Abstract: Proficiency in the use of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has become a basic skill, along with reading, writing and mathematics, and education systems aim at ensuring satisfactory skill level in this aspect. Since 2004, high schools in Norway have increasingly provided personal laptops to students. In line with a growing concern regarding the negative effects of ICTs on well-being, particularly among young people, we evaluate the effect of this distribution on different aspects of students’ well-being (bullying, happiness at school) by leveraging the staggered implementation of the program across schools. We collected data on the year of adoption and matched it with data from a national student survey that occurred every year from 2006 to 2011. The overall results point towards no effect of the program implementation on our well-being outcomes. We find a diminution in the propensity to declare oneself bullied at school, which can be interpreted as a substitution to cyberbullying or crowd-out to other activities. The results suggest the effect is driven by schools where students’ satisfaction with their teachers is above the median.

Keywords: Well-being; Laptop; High school (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272775725000330
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:106:y:2025:i:c:s0272775725000330

DOI: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2025.102653

Access Statistics for this article

Economics of Education Review is currently edited by E. Cohn

More articles in Economics of Education Review from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-20
Handle: RePEc:eee:ecoedu:v:106:y:2025:i:c:s0272775725000330