Older people and the use of ICTs to communicate with children and grandchildren
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this research we explore older people’s incentives to use Internet services to communicate with their children and grandchildren, and the factors that make older individuals stop using (or even reject) Internet-mediated communications. We apply the uses and gratifications theory, and the gratification niche of medium concept to understand the way people return to less sophisticated tools of communication once the marginal utility is lost. Our analysis is based on empirical evidence the two authors gathered in a set of case studies. We conducted semi-structured interviews with people aged 60 and over in Barcelona, Romania (Bucharest and rural areas), Toronto, Los Angeles, Montevideo, and Lima. The results show that communicating with children and grandchildren when families get separated is an important motivator that “pushes” the elderly to learn more about the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). We emphasize the fact that once motivation is lost (i.e. when family members are back home) the interest in using a particular technology to communicate is diminished, therefore older people might stop using it. We argue for a more dynamic model of technology appropriation for this age group that includes successive stages: ignoring, appropriation, rejection, and re-appropriation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".