Older Audiences and Digital Media: Focus on Romania

Abstract

This report discusses descriptive results of the Computer Assisted Telephone based Survey (CATI) conducted in Romania in December 2016. The present survey is part of the international project Cross-National Longitudinal Study: Older Audiences in the Digital Media Environment (see www.actproject.ca/), and it is planned to be conducted every two years, in three waves, on the same sample of older adults. The sample is representative for the online population of people 60 years old and above living in Romania. The results show that TV is the most important media channel for this age group, followed by radio. Also, we can talk about a specialization of media consume at older people, with Television and television set playing a central role, followed by radio (and radio set), whereas newspapers and magazines are accessed both online and offline. One important incentive for older people to go online and try different mediated communication options is to share their life routine with family and friends. While the Internet becomes a communication medium used all over the paces, older people preferred using it in their own private homes. The report also indicates the important role of mediated communication in interpersonal communication mechanisms in the case of older people.

COVID-19 information source and behavior preference in later life: the role of health satisfaction, socio-demographic background, and country of residence

“…In each one of the participating countries, commercial institutions contacted older internet users in 2016 (then aged 60 years or above) and followed them up twice at two-year intervals (2018, 2020). During November 2020, the data were collected online from all countries, except for Romania, where they were collected via telephone survey [17]. In that month Romania had the first maximum number of COVID-19 infection cases [24], Spain experienced a decrease in number of infection cases after the second wave peak [3], and Israel experienced some decrease in excess mortality due to the infection with the virus [13].…”

Social and satisfied? Social uses of mobile phone and subjective wellbeing in later life

“…Data were collected online in six of the countries, using commercial online respondent panels. Only in Romania they were collected by telephone due to the relatively low share of Internet users in the country's older population (Ivan & Schiau, 2018). The samples were representative of the older population of Internet users in each country as age and gender quotas were used in the sampling (Loos et al, 2019).…”

Adoption of a COVID-19 Contact Tracing App Among Older Internet Users in Finland

“…Respondents were recruited from the respondent panels of commercial research agencies. Questionnaires were administered and filled out online in every country except Romania [19]. The third-wave data set includes 4,445 respondents in total.…”