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

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.