Optimism Prevails in Opinions on the Future of Detroit

Optimism Prevails in Opinions on the Future of Detroit

by Bill Dutton and Bibi Reisdorf, Quello Center, MSU

Conversations about the prospects for Detroit’s future often expose a divide between those who see the city recovering from a decline in population and financial vitality and those who have given up on the city’s recovery. As part of a research project on the role of the Internet and new media in the development of Detroit, the Quello Center surveyed a random sample of Michigan residents about their perspectives on the future of Detroit. Conducted as part of MSU’s State of the State Survey (SOSS), the sample included nearly 1,000 respondents. Each respondent was interviewed over the phone through random sampling of mobile and fixed-line phones in Michigan.

The results show a divided public, but one in which positive views on the prospects for Detroit far outweigh more pessimistic viewpoints. We asked respondents: “Do you believe that the City of Detroit will decline or improve over the coming years?” More than 7 of every 10 respondents expected the city to improve in the coming years (Figure 1). Just under a quarter of respondents (24.8%) said that they expected the city to decline. Only a small proportion (4.7%) thought the city would stay about the same as today.

Moreover, Michigan residents are more positive about the future of Detroit in 2016 than in 2008, five years before the city of Detroit became the largest municipality in the United States to file for bankruptcy on July 18, 2013. In 2008, there was a more equal split among Michiganders, with 27.7% expecting the city to decline, and a slightly larger proportion (32.3%) expecting it to improve. Fully forty percent (40.1%) expected the city to stay in the same situation in 2008, compared to less than 5 percent in 2016. The drop in those expecting things to change might have declined due to a change in response categories, but opinion has clearly shifted to a more positive outlook for Detroit in the post-bankruptcy environment.

Figure 1. Michiganders Optimistic About the City of Detroit’s Future

Figure 1

2008: N=990
2016: N=995.

However, not all Michganders are alike in their views. Those who are more positive are more likely to be African-American, female, have incomes above $30,000 per year, and live inside the city of Detroit. Detroit residents were more positive in both 2008 and 2016, but race and gender differences were particularly marked and changed overtime.

Figure 2 shows that in 2008, African American respondents were far more optimistic about the future of Detroit than were white respondents. For example, in 2008, 52% of African American respondents thought the city would improve, compared to only 28.7% of white respondents (Figure 2). From 2008 to 2016, there has been a dramatic increase in the proportion of more optimistic African American (52.6-75.4%) respondents, as well as white respondents (28.7-69.8%), leaving racial divides in attitudes about the city’s future less pronounced in 2016 than in 2008.

Figure 2. Narrowing Racial Divides in Beliefs About Detroit’s Prospects

Figure 2

African American 2008: N=137
African American 2016: N=118
White 2008: N=835
White 2016: N=772

With respect to gender, Figure 3 shows that more women were pessimistic than men (29.6% of women thought things would improve, compared to 35.2% of men), and proportionately more women were likely to believe things would stay the same (44.2% of women, compared to 35.6% of men). However, by 2016, this had reversed, with 74.1 percent of women believing things would improve for Detroit, as compared with 66.9 percent of men. More men and women were optimistic in 2016, but the gain among women surpassed that among men (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Women Become More Optimistic Than Men About Detroit’s Future

Figure 3

Men 2008: N=477
Men 2016: N=477
Women 2008: N=514
Women 2016: N=479

It is difficult to anticipate the consequences of this shift in opinion. It is possible that a more positive outlook within the population—especially within Detroit itself—will contribute to supporting a growing number of initiatives underway in the central city and neighborhoods of Detroit, ranging from tech startups and urban farming to programs for vulnerable residents in distressed areas of the city.

The Quello Center will continue to follow shifting opinion as it studies the role of the Internet in networking collaborative efforts and opening access to information to its residents in order to support urban development and citizen engagement.

Contact:

Dr Bibi Reisdorf or Professor Bill Dutton at the Quello Center at Quello@msu.edu

Notes

The State of the State Survey (SOSS) is organized and directed by the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research (IPPSR) at Michigan State University. See: http://ippsr.msu.edu/survey-research/state-state-survey-soss

Information about the ICT4Detroit Project of the Quello Center is available at: https://quello.msu.edu/divi/research/ict4detroit-the-role-of-ict-in-collaboration-for-detroits-revitalization/

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: attitudes Detroit future Michigan Michiganders opinions public

Optimism Prevails in Opinions on the Future of Detroit