Social Networks and Social Media Use of Older Adults | 2021-22 Fellow Sofia Gil-Clavel
2021-22 CAnD3 Fellow Sofia Gil-Clavel recently published her second dissertation paper on whether older adults use social media to maintain friendships. Using data from the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and Facebook, the paper found that digital relationships may compensate for the lack of offline social networks among older migrants.
"We are interested in this topic because older adults are a key demographic group that could potentially benefit from access to digital technologies and because digital technologies can be used to help older people maintain family and friends’ networks regardless of geographical distance," noted Sofia in an interview with the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). The study was done in collaboration with Emilio Zagheni, CAnD3 team member, and Valeria Bordone
Read the paper
Gil-Clavel, S., Zagheni, E., Bordone, V.: Close Social Networks Among Older Adults: The Online and Offline Perspectives. Popul Res Policy Rev (2021). DOI: 10.1007/s11113-021-09682-3
Read the MPIDR interview
Do Migrants Over 50 Use Social Media to Maintain Friendships?
More about Sofia
Sofia Gil-Clavel is a PhD student at the Digital and Computational Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, affiliated with the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen. In her work, Sofia uses data from Facebook and Twitter to study older people’s usage of communication technologies and migrants’ cultural integration, respectively. Sofia's links: Website | Twitter
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