Currently submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research
Date Submitted: Jan 19, 2025
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 19, 2025 - Mar 16, 2025
(currently open for review)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited.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.
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