European countries have invested large amounts of money in digital technologies for educational purposes hoping that the use of ICT would enhance student learning. However, recent PISA studies showed that there is no linear relationship between ICT use and PISA results. More specifically, starting with very low ICT use, PISA results improve as ICT use increases, only up to a certain point, however. As ICT use increases further, PISA results tend to become poor again (OECD, 2010, 2011). These findings raised the question if young people who use ICT extensively and attain rather low PISA results constitute a group with a specific social background (Pfeiffer et al. 2007). Analysis of PISA data carried out by one of the authors (Steffens, 2014) revealed that youngsters high in ICT use and low in PISA results tend to come from families that in terms of Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital may be described as families with little cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). While it is plausible that a low degree of a family’s cultural capital may affect PISA achievements of its off-springs, we assume that there is more to a family than its possession of cultural capital. We would therefore like to explore the concept of family culture as a concept that embraces a rich diversity of aspects of family life, including the use of ICT. The “Consejo Escolar del Estado”, an institution of the Ministry of Education of Spain, carried out a study about the participation of families in schools, in line with previous studies related to PISA. By June, 23rd 2015, these data were shared with the academic community inviting its members to explore the data from different perspectives. Three questionnaires were applied to a sample of 27382 families statistically representative of Spanish population and to 275 managers of schools and 1195 teachers. The questionnaires included 141 items, covering various aspects like communication between family and school, participation at school activities, implication in children studies, participation in parents association, membership in management representative bodies as well as personal data as study level, age and resources for learning at home. We worked with the family data in order to explore the relationship between different family cultures and the use of digital technologies.

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