JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The problems associated with an aging population have become a worldwide challenge, affecting multiple countries and regions. While high-income countries have the challenges of an aging population and declining demographic dividend, they also have an elderly population (at and above 60 years old) that are healthier, with better working capabilities, compared with low-income countries. Therefore, promoting the transformation of the “demographic bonus “to “health bonus”, and improving the working life, will reduce the aging population’s negative impact on the structure of the labor force.

Objective:

Understanding the demand of employees aged 60 and above, as well as how to enhance their ability to work and willingness to delay retirement, has great economic and social value and important theoretical significance. This paper narrows the focus of all sectors of the community to the sector of elderly workers, so as to actively improve their workplace conditions and create a better environment for them, thus promoting the health bonus.

Methods:

This study based on the theories relating social support and work ability, and studies the willingness to delay retirement of the elderly from the perspective of social media. And focuses on how the usage of social media by elderly workers influences their work ability (related to both physical and mental health) and work stress, which affected their willingness to delay retirement. This study proposed structural equation model was constructed to studies this question.

Results:

The questionnaire respondents (staff over 55 years old), and they obtained the questionnaire from social media, and 1020 valid questionnaires were recovered. Results from structural equation modeling suggested that the usage of social media at work has a positive impact on elderly workers. In a working state, information support is the main factor affecting the self-efficacy of elderly workers, as compared with emotional support, the self-efficacy has an impact on work ability and ability to regulate work stress. Work ability and work stress have an equally important impact on one’s willingness to delay retirement, while social support has a relatively small impact on this willingness.

Conclusions:

Our study shows that for elderly workers, the willingness to delay retirement is mainly affected by work ability and external work stress. Social support gained from social media can effectively help older people to enhance their work ability and to ease work stress. The results of the model hypothesis test provide the characteristics of elderly workers’ need of social support.