Internet Use and Psychological Well-Being at Advanced Age: Evidence from the English Longitudinal Study of Aging

Abstract

This work explores the connection between psychological well-being and Internet use in older adults. The study is based on a sample of 2314 participants in the English Longitudinal Study of Aging. The subjects, aged 50 years and older, were interviewed every two years over the 2006–2007 to 2014–2015 period. The connection between the use of Internet/Email and the main dimensions of psychological well-being (evaluative, hedonic and eudaimonic) was analyzed by means of three generalized estimating equation models that were fitted on 2-year lagged repeated measurements. The outcome variables, the scores on three well-being scales, were explained in terms of Internet/Email use, controlling for covariates that included health and socioeconomic indicators. The results support the existence of a direct relationship between Internet/Email use and psychological well-being. The connection between the main predictor and the score of the participants on the scale used to measure the eudaimonic aspect was positive and statistically significant at conventional levels (p-value: 0.015). However, the relevance of digital literacy on the evaluative and the hedonic components could not be confirmed (p-values for evaluative and hedonic dimensions were 0.078 and 0.192, respectively).

More Frequent Internet Use during the COVID-19 Pandemic Associates with Enhanced Quality of Life and Lower Depression Scores in Middle-Aged and Older Adults

“…Questions pertaining to internet use are included, although these have varied across waves. Coding internet use as a dichotomous variable(yes/no), Quintana and Cervantes [ 16 ] found that ELSA participants who were internet users reported higher satisfaction with life. Lam and Jivraj [ 17 ] analysed more detailed data from ELSA gathered in the more recent waves 6–8 (2012–2017) to examine the relationship between internet use (both frequency and purpose) and two mental health outcomes (depression symptoms, life satisfaction).…”

Digital technology use and depressive symptoms among older adults in Korea: beneficial for those who have fewer social interactions?

“…Although some studies report non-significant associations between digital technology use and psychological well-being of older adults (Elliot, Mooney, Douthit, & Lynch, 2014;van Ingen, Rains, & Wright, 2017), a growing literature reveals that digital technology use is beneficial for multiple facets of older adults' psychological well-being. Studies report that digital technology use among of older adults is associated with greater quality of life (Khalaila & Vitman-Schorr, 2018), greater life satisfaction and less loneliness (Cotten, Anderson, & McCullough, 2013;Heo, Chun, Lee, Lee, & Kim, 2015;Shapira, Barak, & Gal, 2007;Sims, Reed, & Carr, 2017), greater eudemonic well-being of people aged 50 or over (Quintana, Cervantes, S aez, & Isasi, 2018), and fewer depressive symptoms (Choi & DiNitto, 2013;Chopik, 2016;Cotten, Ford, Ford, & Hale, 2014).…”

“…First and foremost, many studies have measured digital technology use as a binary variable indicating whether or not a respondent uses digital technology (Cotten et al, 2014;Jun & Kim, 2017;Khalaila & Vitman-Schorr, 2018;Quintana et al, 2018). Although useful for comparing users and non-users, a binary measure of digital technology use may be too crude to capture some variations among users as well as the impact of digital technology use on psychological well-being (Dickinson & Gregor, 2006).…”

“…We speculate that part of the inconsistency in findings is due to the omission of social characteristics; many of the studies rely on a vector of psychological characteristics or measures of loneliness (e.g. Sims et al, 2017), religious affiliation (Lifshitz et al, 2018), educational attainment (Hong et al, 2016), or marital status and organizational memberships (Quintana et al, 2018). Among the exemplars, Elliot et al (2014) show that digital technology use is unrelated to depressive symptoms after accounting for social integration.…”

Older Women Online: Engaged, Active and Independent

“…Similarly, we found no quantitative measure of an individual's digital capability, such as the ADII score, that suited this older cohort. Two very recent quantitative studies (Heo et al 2015;Quintana et al 2018;Szabo et al 2018) have reported general links between internet use on the wellbeing of older people but little detail results from this approach. Previous literature has shown that limited, and even conflicting, results have come from studies that use surveys or experiments with older participants (Hagan et al 2014).…”