Innovative Consumption Practices. Utilization of the Internet Shopping in Russian Households

Many everyday practices go online and shopping is not an exclusion – each year online shopping practice gets more and more widespread. The tendency to move everyday practices to online sphere contributes to establishing a new form of inequality – namely, second-order digital inequality. In this work, we will focus on the difference between people included in the innovative consumer practices, and those excluded from them. Do socio-demographic characteristic, geographical contest, innovativeness and openness to experience, as well as involvement in adjacent Internet using practices influence inclusion in the practice of making purchases through Internet? To test hypotheses of this research we used the data of 2015 RLMS-HSE 24th wave survey. The sample group used for this research included Russian Internet users only. Analysis method used was multinomial binary logistic regression. Empirical analysis has shown that classic factors of digital inequality, such as age, education, type and region of the place of residence are in close relation with using Internet to make purchases. However, the significant connection with belonging to certain professional group in models including socio-demographical and regional contest only, is not observed in models including more meaningful predictors, e.g. using Internet with adjacent intents and/or characteristics reflecting on respondent’s innovativeness. This lets us assume that traditional way of consideration of socio-demographical characteristics in the framework of digital inequality theory may lose its relevance compared to including such predictors as linked practices and life trajectories of an individual.