Weaving Social Connectivity into the Community Fabric: Exploring Older Adult’s Relationships to Technology and Place
Abstract
:1. Introduction
1.1. Older Adults and Social Connectivity
1.2. The Supporting Role of Technology
2. Methods
2.1. Stage One: Community Interviews
- Have you lived here a long time/how did you come to live here?
- What is it like to live here?
- How would you describe your local community?
- How do you maintain social connections with people inside/outside of the community?
- How do you feel about social technology like mobile phones, Facebook, Skype?
2.2. Stage Two: Community Mapping Focus Group
- Draw a map of your community including the places that are important to you and the places you visit most often.
- Using sticky notes, write down how often you visit each place you have included on your map (e.g., once a day, once a week, once a month, once a year).
- Are there places you visit regularly that are outside of your community? Using sticky notes make a list of these locations and write down how often you visit them.
- Are there people you contact regularly by technological means (e.g., phone calls or video chats)? Using sticky notes make a list of these people (e.g., friend, daughter, cousin) and where they live (suburb or city), and write down how often you speak with them.
3. Findings
3.1. Hesitation about Online Friendships and Social Technology
Friend to me means someone that you choose to remain in contact with, not someone who can impose their friendship on you.(Participant 1)
But it does mean that they probably need someone from an aged care facility to come and show them how to use it, because they can’t get out to go to some kind of session. And even if they could, they’d probably hate it. Because it needs to start with how do you turn the machine on. I think there’s a lot of people that don’t realise, people out there who have never turned a computer on. It’s very frightening. They need to set up the firewalls for them with automatic updates and that kind of thing, because they don’t know about that kind of thing.(Participant 1)
3.2. Motivation to Use Social Media
It’s a brilliant medium for carers. My husband has Alzheimer’s and so there’s a lot of friendships that I can’t fly off to Tassie, I can’t fly off to New Zealand to see my sister, but I can keep in touch with them through social mediums and emails and things, which is very comforting, because you can feel quite isolated in that scenario … It’s huge for me. Because [my husband is] in bed by 8 o’clock at night, so we don’t go out at night much at all. Which doesn’t really worry me. But if I didn’t have that sometimes, just to send an email off, it would be very lonely.(Participant 1)
I’m surprised how little I miss my granddaughter, considering she’s been gone nearly a year, I suppose. Because I talk to her all the time, it’s not as though she’s gone anywhere.(Participant 2)
Sometimes I think the communication is actually enhanced because you think about what you write a little bit more than you think about what you say. And so you can phrase things really carefully, which in my case, which is sort of like verbal diarrhoea, you know. I think in some ways it’s enhanced my relationship with my son.(Participant 1)
3.3. Potential for Older People to Make Community Contributions via Social Media
We’ve put our names down for that Old Colonists Association for the retirement village. And I’ve always thought, if I get there, I could always help other people with using the technology, because I think a lot of them would like to, but they need someone they can just go to and say, what happened?(Participant 1)
I do really think that older people in the community are undervalued when it comes to things like that with social media, because I think the general opinion is, we know nothing about it, we can’t master it, we can’t navigate our way around technology. But I think that we could be a great community asset for any campaign, any local campaign like we had, because we’re home a lot.(Participant 2)
3.4. Role of Technology in the Relationship between Place and Identity
I’m originally from London. When I met my husband, he was living in [a green suburb of Melbourne], but we went to live in Tasmania. And we came back eight years ago and bought a house here ready for retirement, because … we loved Tasmania, it’s a beautiful place. But the services are appalling. To the point where my husband suffers psoriasis, so he wanted to go back to a specialist he’d already seen and was told he’d have to wait a year for an appointment. So we decided to move on the urban fringe because we could get the benefits of having a rural setting, but with the services that an urban environment provides. So this was on the train line to the [anonymised hospital], has a really good doctors’ surgery, has good dentists, all that kind of thing. So it was about as far out as we could get and still get those sorts of services, and we liked it.(Participant 1)
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
References
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Paulovich, B.; Pedell, S.; Tandori, E.; Beh, J. Weaving Social Connectivity into the Community Fabric: Exploring Older Adult’s Relationships to Technology and Place. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 8500. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19148500
Paulovich B, Pedell S, Tandori E, Beh J. Weaving Social Connectivity into the Community Fabric: Exploring Older Adult’s Relationships to Technology and Place. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. 2022; 19(14):8500. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19148500
Chicago/Turabian StylePaulovich, Belinda, Sonja Pedell, Erica Tandori, and Jeanie Beh. 2022. "Weaving Social Connectivity into the Community Fabric: Exploring Older Adult’s Relationships to Technology and Place" International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 19, no. 14: 8500. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19148500