Impact of digital literacy on aging attitudes of the elderly from the perspective of social cognitive theory.

Abstract

Background: Under the background of digital economy, increasing awareness of active ageing through digital literacy is a realistic requirement to deal with deep aging. However, the lack of digital literacy and skills of the elderly seriously affects the ways and means of their participation in the digital society, and then produces negative aging attitudes such as loneliness, isolation and uselessness.

Methods: We adopt stratified sampling to conduct a comprehensive social survey on the elderly care status of the elderly in six provinces including Henan, Hubei, Shaanxi, Gansu, Jiangsu and Shandong in July 2023, and use Ordinal Logistic Regression method to analysis the impact of digital literacy on aging attitudes.

Results: The study finds that the improvement of digital literacy can significantly inhibit the aging attitude of the elderly. Further, mechanism analysis finds that the improvement of digital literacy has empowerment effect and energizing effect. In addition, compared with the urban, high-income and low-age elderly groups, the aging attitudes of rural, low-income and high-age elderly groups are relatively less dependent on digital literacy.

Conclusions: The improvement of digital literacy can significantly inhibit the aging attitude of the elderly, so the government should optimize the balance and accessibility of digital resources and eliminate digital inequality among the elderly.