Aims and Research: The relationship of education and internet with social equality

Social equality represents a state of affairs, where all people have experienced same status within a society based on some aspects. These aspects could be property rights, civil rights and freedom of speech along with availability of basic goods and services in the society (Aoki et al. 2014). Through maintaining equality within the society, the government can reduce the probability of discrimination, which further can influence the society adversely through generating economic costs. This type of security also considers economic equality along with health equality. There are various obstacles that a society can experience due to this economic phenomenon. For the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), inequality has become a central issue. This is because increasing inequalities in wealth and income cause instability within an economy. As a result, social inequalities can generate obstacles to adopt pro-environment behavior and strategies. Arguments for social equality are based on five economic factors, which are health, social relationships, development of human capital and economic progress as well as sustainable economies (Fagan and Rubery 2018). Inequality occurs within the society when life expectancy remains low compare to the rates of mortality. Social relationships consider social capital and trust. The levels of social cohesion remain low for an unequal society. In addition to this, development of human capital also indicates that a society moves towards equality. Moreover, economic progress along with sustainable economies can reduce poverty through generating more employment opportunities. Social benefits or services, in this context, work like a catalyst to lead the society towards an equal one. Social benefit implies the total benefit that a society can obtain through producing and consuming different goods and services (Jacobs 2018). Therefore, social benefit considers entire private benefits along with external benefits related to the product. Social benefits include education and communication facility such as internet connection. According to researchers, education helps a society to generate human capital while internet can help to obtain other social facilities within short time period (Leaton Gray 2017). Therefore the paper intends to discuss about the role of social benefits to bring equality in society.

Aims and Research: The relationship of education and internet with social equality

In the first section, the paper has introduced the basic concept of the study and provided the background of the entire study. In the following section, conceptual framework has been derived to review the related literatures. This section helps the researcher to frame concepts accordingly. This in turn can help the researcher to establish proper hypothesis. In the section of research methodology, the paper will analyze the data to draw conclusions.

The economy can experience many costs and benefits regarding unequal or equal societies, based on wealth and household distribution.  In this context, economists try to investigate various social benefits that can reduce inequality among people. In these regard, two chief components internet and capital are required to discuss. According to World Health Organization (2014), has stated that an unequal society can generate more problems including health, infant mortality, mental illness and obesity and so on. The researcher has observed that equal societies tend to better educational facilities along with general health and higher social mobility. Through developing educational facilities, a society can generate human capital by large amount. This increasing number of efficient and skilled labors can produce output at lower costs by utilizing available resources fully (Mordechay and Orfield 2017). From previous studies, it is observed that the number of higher educational attainment is comparatively low than that of developed countries. Consequently, these developing countries cannot produce standard output by large extend through applying labor intensive techniques. This in turn reduces the opportunity to export these products in other countries and consequently the opportunity to foreign capital reduces. In other studies, researchers have stated that through improving educational facility, a county can increase per capita income significantly (Le Grand 2018). In addition to this, studies related to educational attainment and its impact on society have identified that skilled workers earn comparatively more wages than that of the unskilled or semi-skilled workers. These skilled workers capture a small fraction of total labor force though earn almost half of the total wages. On the other side, unskilled along with semi-skilled workers capture maximum share of the total work force though earn comparatively very low wages (Bondi and Matthews 2017). As a result, the society can experience unequal distribution of income. According to researchers, equality implies the goal to provide same opportunities to all people without any within the society does not benefit a particular section of people rather it benefits a society as a whole. Through giving proper access of education, the economy can increase its accessibility through increasing economic opportunities (Raju 2018). This factor mostly focuses on women education.

Conceptual Framework

Researchers also discuss about digital equality. In modern world, use of internet has become an essential factor and this further can lead a society towards an equal world. In this context, Correa (2016) has stated that inequality acts as one of the chief challenges that a society experiences. In this context, researcher have argued that Web can help a society to decline socio-political along with economic a gender inequality. Moore Jr (2016) has argued that increasing use of online has centralized in few hands. Moreover, limited number of people has the power to control this digital collection (Iliffe et al. 2017). Therefore, an inequality has been generated within the society. Researchers have stated that open internet is an essential tool to construct an inclusive society (Childress et al. 2018). However, technology based companies generally form and restrict the accessibility of free and open network (Boulianne 2015). Therefore, it is observed that digitization leads to inequality within country and this in turn creates huge difference between poor and rich countries.

Hypothesis:

Depending on previous research articles, this paper generates two hypotheses to conduct further research analysis.

Hypothesis 1: Impact of internet on social purpose/activity to achieve social equality:

Null Hypothesis (H10): The use of internet does not help a society to achieve equality

Alternative hypothesis (H11): The use of internet helps a society to achieve equality

Hypothesis 2: Impact of education on social purpose/activity to achieve social equality:

Null Hypothesis (H20): Education does not help a society to achieve equality

Alternative hypothesis (H21): Education helps a society to achieve equality

Research methodology plays significant role to obtain the desired outcome in any research study. This research methodology considers the process of collecting relevant data and information to conduct further analysis to find outcome of the study. In this regard, the exploratory type of research has been done to address proper research problem. Based on this type of research methodology, the researcher can successfully establish the relationship between dependent and independent variables. The data, collected for a research analysis, can be classified into two categories. These are primary data and secondary data. The researcher obtains primary data directly from the field through conducting survey or interview. On the other side, the concerned person can collect secondary data from previous articles or literature reviews or other online as well as offline sources. In this paper, the researcher has collected the data based on the UK from 1959. Moreover, the researcher has applied non-probability random sampling technique, which can choose a particular set sample from a large population.

The collected data can be of two types, which are, quantitative data and qualitative data. Quantitative data considers numerical value that can be divided into small fraction while qualitative data describes some features of the data set. After collecting data, the researcher intends to analyze this with help of proper statistical method. In this context, researcher has selected the process of quantitative data analysis. The first analysis describes about the shape as well as nature of the distribution. Through descriptive statistics, the researcher describes about the concept of mean, median and standard distribution of the collected data. Furthermore, the study analyses correlation for providing a rough concept regarding the relationship between dependent and independent variables. At the end, the researcher has analyzed statistical validation of social equality based on education and internet.

Methodology

This section focuses on various statistical analyses to establish the hypothesis from which an outcome can be drawn.

Before analyzing the data in a detailed statistical process, it can be helpful for the researcher to observe that whether distribution of targeted follows any assumptions of standard statistics, such as, linearity, normality, multicolinearity or homoscedasticity. To investigate the assumption of normality, the researcher has drawn histograms. For the available histogram, it is seen that state of education as well as social benefits or services have bell shaped curve, indicating that data are distributed normally. On the contrary, distribution of internet use is negatively skewed.

The following table represents the descriptive statistics for state of education, internet use and social activity to achieve social benefits

Table 1: Descriptive statistics

Statistics
	Internet use, how often	State of education in country nowadays	Social benefits/services lead to a more equal society
N	Valid	1959	1887	1931
Missing	0	72	28
Mean	4.02	5.76	2.98
Median	5.00	6.00	3.00
Mode	5	7	2
Std. Deviation	1.509	2.062	.911

According to above table, the value of mean median and model can be observed as 4, 5 and 5. This implies that internet use acts as an important social service that can lead a society towards equality. The mean, median and mode of state of education are 6, 6 and 7, which imply that this dependent variable also has significant importance in the UK to bring social equality. In addition to this, the value of mean, median and mode are 2, 3 and 2. This sharply indicates that social benefits have successfully lead the society of UK towards equality.

Table 2: Correlation analysis

Coefficient Correlationsa
Model	Years of full-time education completed	Internet use, how often
1	Correlations	Years of full-time education completed	1.000	-.350
Internet use, how often	-.350	1.000
Covariances	Years of full-time education completed	3.268E-005	-2.982E-005
Internet use, how often	-2.982E-005	.000
a. Dependent Variable: Social benefits/services lead to a more equal society

The above table represents correlation coefficient between internet use and years of full time education as -0.350. This value indicates that these two variables have a negative association that is comparatively week (Ye 2014). However, this value of correlation does not provide any significant value based on level of significance of 5%.

Variables Entered/Removeda
Model	Variables Entered	Variables Removed	Method
1	Years of full-time education completed, Internet use, how oftenb	.	Enter
a. Dependent Variable: Social benefits/services lead to a more equal society
b. All requested variables entered.

The regression analysis is applied to establish a valid relationship between internet use and social equality along with state of education and social equality (Chatterjee and Hadi 2015). For this a regression analysis has been done where social equality acts as dependent variable and internet use as well as state of education acts as independent variable.

Model Summaryb
Model	R	R Square	Adjusted R Square	Std. Error of the Estimate
1	.031a	.001	.000	.911
a. Predictors: (Constant), Years of full-time education completed, Internet use, how often
b. Dependent Variable: Social benefits/services lead to a more equal society

ANOVAa
Model	Sum of Squares	df	Mean Square	F	Sig.
1	Regression	1.479	2	.739	.891	.410b
Residual	1584.726	1910	.830
Total	1586.205	1912
a. Dependent Variable: Social benefits/services lead to a more equal society
b. Predictors: (Constant), Years of full-time education completed, Internet use, how often

The coefficient of internet use is -0.20 while that for years of full-time education is -0.04. This implies that years of education has a negative relationship with social equality in the UK while use of internet has a positive relationship.

Conclusion:

Therefore, from the above discussion it is observed that internet use has positive impact on the UK to bring social equality while the use of education plays an opposite role. Therefore, from this analysis it can be concluded that use of in modern world, internet has vital role in a society. On the contrary, higher educational attainment cannot play any vital role in the UK to lead to society towards an equal one.

References:

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