Determinants of Creativity-Related Skills and Activities Among Young People in Three Latin American Countries

Digital media are part of children’s and young people’s everyday lives. From communication, learning consumption, and leisure, their lives in the twenty-first century are digitally mediated, almost by default. In this context, affordances offered by Web 2.0 participatory culture, such as user-generated content and a progression from textual to visual representations, enable young users to create and share video content online, allowing them to experience an active role as cultural producers. Nonetheless, the initial promises of billions of active consumers and creative content producers are far from a reality, particularly in the global south. This chapter delves into the prevalence of video and music creation in two Latin American countries, as audiovisual production has been identified as one of the online activities with the highest level of creativity. The Global Kids Online survey found that sharing music or video created by oneself was one of the least prevalent online activities among young people between 9 and 17 years old in Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. Nonetheless, youngsters who say they have the skill to “upload videos or music you have created” are more than double those engaging in the creative activity (even if the digital skill itself is less prevalent in these cohorts). Therefore, the present study will analyze the determinants of creative-related skill and activity. It will focus on their antecedents considering digital inequalities and socioeconomic and psychological factors associated with both variables across the four countries. The findings show that content creation-related digital skill is the strongest predictor of content creation activity. Nevertheless, other sociological and psychological well-being determinants, particularly those in line with the Global Kids Online theoretical model, also play relevant roles.