Digital Literacy Competencies and Interests of Elderly People
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| Year of publication | 2021 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper deals with the topic of the secondary digital divide of elderly people. Digital skills are the primary requirement to carry out various online activities. These skills could make life easier and can help to acquire many positive results from using the Internet (Van Deursen, 2018). Today's technology boom and its penetration into all life spheres place demands on elderly people to avoid digital exclusion and to take full advantage of the benefits that the Internet and ICT offer. Some surveys emphasize the social point of view of this topic (Wu, 2015; van Dijk, 2012) and they recommend observing how different social groups work with the Internet and technology in general. Qualitative research on the needs of Czech seniors in work with the Internet has already been published (Zadražilová, 2017). The presented research aimed to describe the digital literacy of seniors and their learning interests in topics related to the Internet and ICT. The main research questions were: What is the perceived level of seniors' competences in digital literacy? In which digital literacy topics do seniors prefer to be educated? We compared answers of elderly people according to their age and previous education in digital literacy. To focus on the secondary digital divide of elderly people, we limited our study on people age 65+, and active work with the Internet and Czech citizenship. The link for the online questionnaire was circulated by a snowball sampling, with the help of libraries and nonprofit organizations focused on elderly people, between 17th January and 7th February 2018. We received 758 responses. We analysed the data quantitatively using IBM SPSS Statistics. Elderly people declare a relatively high degree of digital literacy by self-evaluation and self-confidence in everyday internet activities. We did not test real competencies because of the attitude of seniors (they declared they would not respond to this form of a survey in interviews in the previous phase of research). At the same time, seniors were generally very interested in information literacy education through various types of informal institutions, such as libraries. They were more often interested in topics related to content (the most common interests were working with photos, quality of information, and risks of working with information) than to using software or online application (the least common interest was in PowerPoint and Excel). We also supposed that younger seniors achieve a higher level of digital competencies than the older ones. But we found the opposite dependence (r = 0,2, correlation is significant at the 0.01 level). The Kruskal-Wallis test proved statistical differences in digital literacy according to previous education (H = 23.795, df = 2, p = 0.000) with benefits of help by someone else. The best results were for respondents educated by someone else (mean 181.93), followed by respondents taught about the internet by someone, but self-educated about computer use (mean 177.16) and strictly self-educated (mean 125.71). |