ABSTRACT
Older Americans are often framed as ‘have nots’ in a world where ‘born digital’ young people rule everything from programming the video cassette recorder (VCR) to posting videos on YouTube (Fox & Madden 2005; Willis 2006). But the older population is not mired in an analog era. The Pew Internet and American Life Project reports that Internet use is growing rapidly among older populations (Fox & Madden 2005). Among those who are just entering their senior years, many are Internet users: 68 per cent of those aged 55-59 and 55 per cent of those aged 60-64. More than half of Americans aged 65-69 (57 per cent) report that they are online. The drop in use seems to begin at age 70 with only 27 per cent of those aged 70-75 using the Internet. Among the oldest Americans (age 75+), 17 per cent are Internet users (Fox & Madden 2005). It is possible that people who now use the Internet at work will continue to be Internet users even when their work years have ended. This suggests a possible growth in adoption among older seniors in the near future; particularly as baby boomers age over the next decade, the proportion of seniors using the Internet will continue its rapid growth (Rideout et al. 2005). Older adults are among the heaviest users of the Internet for health-related
information (Fox & Rainie 2002; Holstein & Lundberg 2003; Macias & McMillan 2008). About 70 per cent of online seniors report using the Internet for health information (Fox & Fallows 2003). Perhaps one motivation for the heavy use is the perceived trustworthiness of online health information; a Kaiser Family Foundation survey revealed that, for adults aged 50-64, the Internet is considered a more trustworthy source of health information than any traditional mass medium other than books. This trust placed in online health information issues an important warning to practitioners and scholars, as we must stress to senior audiences the importance of filtering and checking information sources (Rideout et al. 2005). Researchers have examined ways to make health-related websites more
accessible to older adults (Marwick 1999; Cohen 2001; Vanderheiden & Iacona 2001; Flynn et al. 2006) and have reported on the development of training
programs that had a positive impact on seniors’ use of online health information (Morrell 2002; Kaufman & Rockoff 2006). One example of a successful training program was a joint-sponsored project to ‘train trainers’ of senior citizens across the USA on how to use the Internet for health information. The project was designed to give older adults better access to valuable health information on the Internet and to enable them to evaluate and share this information. This training had a positive effect on the confidence of seniors who used the Internet for health information as well and also shared this health information with family and friends (Mehnert & Gardner 1998). However, relatively few scholarly studies have probed for in-depth understanding of seniors’ use of the Internet for health information (Macias & McMillan 2008). The primary purpose of this study is to gain insight into the older Amer-
icans who are already using the Internet. In particular, how do they view this digital environment as a resource for health information? Studying these Internet-active seniors is important because they represent a first wave of future health trends. Studies have shown that the baby boom generation is expected to place new burdens on the health care system as members of that population age (Llewellyn et al. 2004). But this generation that was born in the decades immediately following World War II is also far more technologically savvy than earlier generations (Willis 2006). Thus, by studying current online seniors, as well as some of the older members of the baby boom generation, we can begin to detect future patterns in the uses of technology for health information seeking. Qualitative methods are particularly useful because such methods allow for depth of insight to emerge from participants in a way that the many quantitative studies of online health information seeking (Flynn et al. 2006; Fox 2006; Hesse et al. 2006) cannot. This study uses a grounded theory approach to address the phenomenon of
senior citizens’ use of online health information (Corbin & Strauss 1990; Strauss & Corbin 1990). This approach allows the theory to emerge from the insights provided by participants rather than imposing pre-existing theoretical perspectives from the literature.
