Previously submitted to: Interactive Journal of Medical Research (no longer under consideration since Jul 15, 2025)
Date Submitted: Jan 19, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 19, 2025 - Mar 16, 2025
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
NOTE: This is an unreviewed Preprint
Warning: This is a unreviewed preprint (What is a preprint?). Readers are warned that the document has not been peer-reviewed by expert/patient reviewers or an academic editor, may contain misleading claims, and is likely to undergo changes before final publication, if accepted, or may have been rejected/withdrawn (a note "no longer under consideration" will appear above).
Peer review me: Readers with interest and expertise are encouraged to sign up as peer-reviewer, if the paper is within an open peer-review period (in this case, a "Peer Review Me" button to sign up as reviewer is displayed above). All preprints currently open for review are listed here. Outside of the formal open peer-review period we encourage you to tweet about the preprint.
Citation: Please cite this preprint only for review purposes or for grant applications and CVs (if you are the author).
Final version: If our system detects a final peer-reviewed "version of record" (VoR) published in any journal, a link to that VoR will appear below. Readers are then encourage to cite the VoR instead of this preprint.
Settings: If you are the author, you can login and change the preprint display settings, but the preprint URL/DOI is supposed to be stable and citable, so it should not be removed once posted.
Submit: To post your own preprint, simply submit to any JMIR journal, and choose the appropriate settings to expose your submitted version as preprint.
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Internet use and depression among Chinese older adults: the role of education
ABSTRACT
Background:
Many studies have shown that better-educated adults are often associated with higher rates of internet use and digital skills who could improves the health condition by internet use.The majority of current older adults aged 60 in China lacked educational opportunities in early life who more likely excluded from the information society. Internet use has further penetrated into the older adults, together with the high prevalence of depression, it is important to have a better understanding whether education is found to play mediating role between Internet use and depression.
Objective:
To investigate Internet use and the potential associations with depression among the Chinese older adults , with a particular focus on the mediating role of education
Methods:
The data of this study were sourced from the 2021 wave of Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), involving 3206 older adults aged 60 and above. A logistical regression model was used to explore the impact of internet use on depressive symptoms. Moreover, the add-on PROCESS macro for SPSS was employed to measure the mediating effect of education attainment on the relationship between internet use and self-report depressive feelings, controlling for covariant.
Results:
The results showed that internet use was significantly associated with reduced depression feelings among older adults in China. The mediating effect model showed that the total effect of the internet use on depression feelings was 0.108 and the direct effect was 0.078, and the education attainment played a mediating effect between the internet use and depression partly.
Conclusions:
This study reveals that internet use has a positive effect on depressive among the older adults in China. Furthermore, this study also provides new evidence indicating that education partly mediates the relationship between internet use and depressive. Reduce digital divide could be a promising way for China to promote healthy aging in the future.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.