Older People, New Needs, and Possible Solutions. A Pilot Study on Peer-to-peer Digital Education

Overview

"Older people, new needs, and possible solutions: A pilot study on peer-to-peer digital education" aims to create a digital literacy protocol targeted specifically to older people, providing them with the digital skills needed to age healthily and actively in a changing social context. Specifically, the main goal is to pilot (by designing, implementing, and evaluating) a peer-to-peer digital literacy course, whereby older educators teach less digitally savvy older people how to use smartphone daily utility apps, such as e-Gov, home banking, etc. To evaluate the effect of the intervention on participants, smartphone usage patterns are measured before, during, and after the course. Then, the impact of the course on participants' perception of well-being is assessed as well.

This study aims to pilot, by designing, implementing, and evaluating, a digital peer education course for older people, focusing specifically on the use of smartphones and daily utility apps. The course has been co-designed with AUSER MB, a non-profit organization involved in active aging, and the peer tutors. It is structured in ten 90-minute classes covering topics such as emails, online accounts, app downloads, e-Gov apps, healthcare apps, mobility and payment apps, etc. The 30 participants, divided into three groups, have been selected among the 65+ year-old people attending the computer classes already offered by AUSER MB and having a personal smartphone, as a very basic set of digital skills and familiarity with digital devices was necessary for the slightly more advanced topics covered by the course. In addition to piloting the course and aiming to define a protocol that could be replicated in other similar contexts, this study aims to measure the effect of the course on participants' digital skills and their perceived well-being. To do so, the investigators adopted a mixed methods approach, employing digital methods by collecting and analyzing data on participants' smartphone use (i.e., log data on smartphone use before/during/after the intervention), a quasi-experiment collecting information on course participants' well-being before/after the course attendance using a questionnaire survey, and ethnographic observation conducted during the course, observing interactions between subjects during the course. The study is part of the project "ACTIVE ageing in changing societies. Older people's social and digital resources in pandemic and post-pandemic Italy (ACTIVE-IT)", funded by the Italian Fondazione Cariplo