Digital skills have become important for navigating in today’s information society but are still unevenly distributed in the population. While prior research has mostly focused on studying general Internet use, research on smartphone-specific digital inequalities is still scarce. To date, we have a limited understanding of the distribution of smartphone skills in the population as well as the determinants and consequences of inequalities in smartphone skills. In addition, existing measurement instruments of digital skills mostly rely on survey-based self-reports or small-scale laboratory-based performance tests that are potentially subject to measurement and representation errors. In this paper, we report the results from a survey experiment comparing a scenario-based measure as an innovative method for measuring smartphone skills with a self-reported skills measure. In the scenario-based measure, respondents are presented with hypothetical scenarios of activities that they would perform on their smartphone, such as buying a train ticket with an app that is not yet installed on their device. They are then asked to correctly order a set of steps to carry out these activities, such as downloading an app from the app store, entering login details, and searching for train connections. In the self-reported measure, respondents are asked to rate their smartphone skills on a scale from 1=Beginner to 5=Advanced. Data were collected in the German Internet Panel, a probability-based online panel of the general population aged 16-75 in Germany, in March 2022. First, we will examine to what extent both measures capture the same construct by conducting an Exploratory Factor Analysis. Second, we will assess whether predictors of smartphone skills vary by how skills are being measured by fitting OLS regression models.
