7. Discussion and conclusions
The research question posed in this paper was whether the differences in social standing among adolescents perpetuate digital usage inequality in that age group. Thus, the aim of this study was to test a theory of social uses of the Internet (Lopez- Sintas et al., 2012, p. 119) in this age group. Adolescents were chosen as a single age group to be investigated in order to avoid the potentially obscuring strong effects of age that might make other components of social standing (i.e., social status) seem as less important in the structuring of digital use. The theory of social uses of the Internet integrates the concepts of scale of consumption and linkage needs (Douglas & Isherwood, 1979) with Bourdieu's theory of taste (Bourdieu, 1984; 1986; 1989) and suggests that there is a homology between an individual's social standing and Internet use, in that social differences are reflected in different patterns of Internet use (Lopez-Sintas et al., 2012 , p. 121). This paper contributes to the debate on digital usage inequality by testing the social theory of Internet use outside the Spanish national context in which it was initially formulated: i.e. in Germany and Norway. The testing was done using PISA 2012 data on digital usage by fifteen year-olds from these countries. These two European countries, although they share with Spain many characteristics regarding the level of economic, social, and technological development, are at the same time different enough to provide an environment in which it was not self-evident whether the theory would be corroborated, rejected, or modified. Moreover, while the national contexts for testing the theory might differ, the analytical approach of the present paper follows the work of Lopez-Sintas et al. (2012) by adopting Geometric Data Analysis (Le Roux & Rouanet, 2004; Le Roux & Rouanet, 2010) as the method of investigation.
