Social media use can have a positive impact on the well-being of socially isolated seniors, according to research by Yijung K. Kim of the University of Texas at Austin . People aged 65 and over took part in the study. Those who use social media more have a more positive mood than those who don't, according to the results. But this only applies if the network you use is not too large.
Social media use among seniors has hardly been researched
“When the pandemic lockdown forced everyone to stay at home and rely on the internet for social connections and information sharing, I wanted to know if there was a digital divide between younger and older people.”
Yijung K. Kim
There has been hardly any research on this.
“To better understand older adults’ social media use, it was important to go beyond comparing social media users to non-social media users and compare individuals’ moods on days when they “Used social media more and less intensively.”
The study design
The study involved 313 Austin adults with an average age of 74 years. They filled out questionnaires about six times a day for five to six days. In it, they rated their mood, reported whether they had used social media in the past three hours, and whether they had had personal social encounters in the past three hours.
These daily assessments allowed the researcher to analyze how a person's daily social media use is related to their mood that day and to the level of personal socialization that day.
Social media lifts your mood, but talking on the phone dampens it
As expected, a greater number of face-to-face social encounters improved mood, as did using social media in the absence of face-to-face contact. Unexpectedly, more time on the phone led to a worse mood.
The results suggest that social media is most beneficial for older adults with few in-person social contacts. Participants with smaller social networks said increased social media use was good for their mood. Those who were on a larger network, on the other hand, did not benefit from the mood improvement, it is said.
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Source: Pressetext.com
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