GVU's Seventh WWW User Survey Use Graphs

Reference Material

Notes:

Reference information continues to be the most frequently accessed category of those we inquired about, and people are using the Web more frequently than ever to access reference material. Nearly a third of the users (30.77% Seventh vs. 26.93% Sixth) of respondents reported using reference information on a daily basis and 38.50% (39.71% Sixth) use it on a weekly basis. Only 1.02% of the respondents have never accessed reference information on the Web! It seems reasonable that part of the reason for the increase in the number of hours people use the Web is reflected in the increased utility as measured by accessing reference material. Note that this is an area that is highly dependent upon useful content, much of which is has seriously started to emerge. The world of information has essentially become one's bookshelf (well almost). There is little difference across gender in the use of reference material.

Table of Data for All Categories

Reference Material	All	Male	Female	USA	Europe	19-25	26-50	50+
A few times	1434.00 8.80%	946.00 8.64%	468.00 9.13%	1141.00 8.86%	97.00 9.03%	302.00 10.14%	761.00 7.81%	229.00 10.99%
Don't know	112.00 0.69%	82.00 0.75%	25.00 0.49%	72.00 0.56%	14.00 1.30%	23.00 0.77%	48.00 0.49%	15.00 0.72%
Never	167.00 1.02%	94.00 0.86%	68.00 1.33%	126.00 0.98%	15.00 1.40%	39.00 1.31%	68.00 0.70%	26.00 1.25%
Once per day	1342.00 8.23%	938.00 8.57%	387.00 7.55%	1039.00 8.06%	94.00 8.75%	258.00 8.67%	827.00 8.49%	152.00 7.29%
Once per month	539.00 3.31%	358.00 3.27%	173.00 3.38%	439.00 3.41%	28.00 2.61%	135.00 4.53%	291.00 2.99%	48.00 2.30%
Once per week	1101.00 6.75%	764.00 6.98%	322.00 6.28%	837.00 6.50%	91.00 8.47%	250.00 8.40%	608.00 6.24%	108.00 5.18%
Several times per day	3675.00 22.54%	2531.00 23.12%	1076.00 21.00%	2897.00 22.49%	260.00 24.21%	611.00 20.52%	2382.00 24.45%	403.00 19.34%
Several times per month	2756.00 16.90%	1797.00 16.42%	936.00 18.26%	2242.00 17.40%	134.00 12.48%	510.00 17.13%	1631.00 16.74%	355.00 17.03%
Several times per week	5177.00 31.75%	3436.00 31.39%	1670.00 32.59%	4091.00 31.75%	341.00 31.75%	849.00 28.52%	3126.00 32.09%	748.00 35.89%

For more information or to submit comments:
send e-mail to www-survey@cc.gatech.edu.
GVU's WWW Surveying Team
Graphics, Visualization, & Usability Center
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280