Jennifer is a 29-year old Puerto Rican woman, who lives in North Philadelphia. She lives with her common-law husband of 12 years and their two children, ages 5 and 7, in a rented row home. Their neighborhood consists mostly of low-to middle-income Puerto Rican and African American families. Jennifer works part-time (25 to 30 hours per week) as a skip tracer in the Collections Department of a large bank. Earning about $21,000 per year, she is the family's main breadwinner. Her husband is presently unemployed, although he occasionally does odd jobs, and he contributed approximately $5,000 to the household income last year.

Free Time: Jennifer's favorite free-time activity is spending time with her children, "doing anything at all," whatever makes them happy. "I spend so much time at work, I want them to know I can have fun, too." She also enjoys listening to music, dancing in clubs and going to the movies with her husband. She says she writes songs, both words and music and stories, and says she is especially skilled at the latter. "My friends always ...ask me to write something for them to give to their boyfriends." She is currently writing a children's storybook.

Her favorite TV program is "Road Rules" on MTV, which she likes for the adventures the three characters have, and she learns from watching them deal with others. She also likes "shows about tornados and accidents," and she watches "Taina" on Nickelodeon with her kids.

Jennifer has about 25 friends and relatives with whom she stays in touch, and sees them all socially, face-to-face -- and most of these friends and relatives she also keeps in touch by telephone. There are a few friends to whom she sends cards or letters, but she only keeps in email contact with one.

Internet Use: Jennifer does not have a computer at home, but does use a computer at work and at the homes of friends and relatives, especially at her mother's. Jennifer doesn't use instant messaging or chat rooms and her email usage is light. Each day she emails a progress report to coworkers and receives one or two business-related emails in return. Occasionally she receives an email message from a family member as well. "Not many people I know use email now, except at work." She feels that neither the number nor the quality of her personal or business contacts has been affected by her use of email.

Her life at work has been changed a great deal by the internet, however. "It made my work more efficient, gave me more props." Her job consists largely of locating people, and she frequently uses tools and sites of the internet to obtain addresses and telephone numbers which help her find people or which lead her to them.

Jennifer's most frequently used sites for people-searching are 555-1212.com, anywho.com, flipsearch.com, and peoplefinder.com. These sites "help me find people I couldn't find - except through phone books. It would cost more and take a lot of time to do my work without them." Jennifer takes pride in the results she achieves by using the internet's locating resources. She says, "The way I find them takes experience and creativity. I also use maps on the internet to get adjacent street names and sometimes I find the people, or people who are in their family." Jennifer's use of the internet totals about 8 hours per week. Of the 20 hours each week that she uses the computer at work, Jennifer spends 2 hours emailing and 8 hours using the web, all of which are related to her work.

She spends another 3-4 hours each week on the internet outside of work, either at her mother's, her mother-in-law's, or her friend's home. In her most recent non-work session, which was at her mother's, Jennifer used the internet to help her 14-year old sister with her homework. They were looking for material on butterflies and on dinosaurs. They started at the Yahoo search engine, which gave them some links to follow, and they spent most of their time at dinosaurlife.com.

Jennifer first started using the internet at her mother-in-law's and at the home of a friend, in 1989 or 1999. She tends to visit her favorite sites, which she has bookmarked, whenever she goes to the internet, rather than going to new sites. Besides using the internet for the purposes described above, Jennifer has recently used the web to find information on music and concerts, current events and the news.

She uses the internet for about the same amount of time as others she knows, but she uses it more for work than they do.

"I'm not like other people. I see the internet as a tool for work or projects, not fun....I never tried it for shopping. I'm scared of credit cards [afraid someone will steal my card number and run up my bill] and I'd rather shop in person with cash."

Jennifer is a relatively new user of both the computer and the internet, so her exposure to the range of content on the web is limited. Still, she has confidence in her ability to find what she needs and to consult the resources she needs for assistance, if necessary. She is familiar with the concepts of search engines and portals, but does not know how to download or to transfer a file to someone.

Interviewer: Carolyn Rahe