JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Introduction: Digital technologies are increasingly pervading our daily lives. Although older adults started using digital technologies later than other age groups, they are increasingly adopting these technologies, especially with the goal of communicating with others. Less is known about how online social activities are embedded in older adults’ daily lives, how they complement other (offline) social activities, and how they contribute to social connectedness and well-being.

Objective:

Data generated by this project will allow us to understand how older adults use digital communication in their daily lives to communicate with others, how this relates to well-being and social connectedness, and how communication using digital technologies differs from other types of communication depending on situational and individual characteristics. Data collection for this study has been completed in November 2019.

Methods:

In this study, micro-longitudinal data were collected from 120 older adults from German-speaking regions of Switzerland to examine these questions. Data collection took place from April 2019 to October 2019. Data collection took place over different time scales, including event-based (reporting all social interactions for 21 days), daily (well-being, loneliness, and technology use every evening for 21 days), hourly (cortisol assessments six time per day for 3 days), and baseline (relevant interindividual characteristics including socio-demographics, health, technology use, personality, and cognitive performance) assessments.

Results:

Participants reported on average 96.35 interactions across the 21 days. 47.9% of the interactions were face-to-face interactions, and around 16% each were interactions by phone (16.1%), E-Mail (16.3%), and text message (16.3%). 2.1% of interactions took place on social media, 0.8% were letters, and 0.5% of interactions took place on videochat (see figure 2).

Conclusions:

Participants used a variety of modalities in their daily communication, including digital means such as text messages, e-mail, and video calls. Further analysis will show in more detail which role communication via digital media played in older adults' daily lives.