  The digital divide is the gap among population sub-groups in accessing and/or
using digital technologies. For instance, older people show a lower propensity
to have a broadband connection, use the Internet, and adopt new technologies
than the younger ones. Motivated by the analysis of the heterogeneity in the
use of digital technologies, we build a bipartite network concerning the
presence of various digital skills in individuals from three different European
countries: Finland, Italy, and Bulgaria. Bipartite networks provide a useful
structure for representing relationships between two disjoint sets of nodes,
formally called sending and receiving nodes. The goal is to perform a
clustering of individuals (sending nodes) based on their digital skills
(receiving nodes) for each country. In this regard, we employ a Mixture of
Latent Trait Analyzers (MLTA) accounting for concomitant variables, which
allows us to (i) cluster individuals according to their individual profile;
(ii) analyze how socio-economic and demographic characteristics, as well as
intergenerational ties, influence individual digitalization. Results show that
the type of digitalization substantially depends on age, income and level of
education, while the presence of children in the household seems to play an
important role in the digitalization process in Italy and Finland only.
