Digital Inequality in the Age of GenAI: How Rural versus Urban Parents Differ in AI Perceptions and Adoption
Year: 2026
Type: conference-paper
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: As Generative AI (GenAI) expands into spaces children inhabit, their early exposure to GenAI marks a crucial stage in shaping lifelong trajectories with these emerging technologies. This paper focuses on the often under-explored importance of parents’ GenAI adoption. Knowing that parents can play a key role in scaffolding children’s GenAI use, we examined potential sources of inequality in parental attitudes and adoption of GenAI. Specifically, we tested whether the urban-rural divide functions as a structural barrier to GenAI adoption amongst parents. We conducted a nationally representative survey of 2,826 parents in the United States urban (N = 2,398) and rural (N = 428), and analyzed differences in GenAI adoption, perception and use across geographic context. Rural parents adopted GenAI at nearly half the rate of urban parents, a gap that persisted after controlling for household income and educational attainment. Multivariate modeling indicates that geography served as the strongest predictor in our model of AI adoption in our sample (OR = 1.80). Critically, this disparity appeared to be influenced not by differences in engagement or perceived risk but by lower perceived usefulness. We used Van Dijk’s concept of motivational access, one defined not by access or skill, but by meaning-making and motivated adoption to further understand these barriers and argue that standard diffusion approaches, awareness campaigns, and device provision are insufficient. We propose that closing this divide for both parents and children requires interventions targeted towards parental concerns and builds perceived usefulness from the ground up: co-design processes embedded in rural community contexts, AI demonstrations anchored to locally recognizable use cases (farming, rural healthcare, vocational learning), and parent-facing features that help caregivers see themselves as capable mediators of their children’s AI experiences.
Institution: University of California, Irvine
Language: English
Subfield: Education
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7165398113