Topic: How the internet affects older generations.

Research Question:

How does internet affect older generations?

How you gathered your data, challenges you faced, things you learned about research

First I started with making a survey on survey monkey. It was an online survey and only ten people took it. I went into panic mode, I ended up making the survey in word and printing out. I heard the Italian catholic federation was having a dinner at the church so I went to it. I asked if I could make an announcement and asked people over 50 if they could take my survey, I was able to get 34 responses. I only had one real issue with the interviews and that was an older lady not owning a computer so she just answered no to everything. The biggest issue is that I was stressed and had an idea that I might not be able to get everything done because i needed to do well in order to pass the class.

Discussion

Being able to study how the internet affects older generations was a great experience. I was inspired by my grandparents’ use of the internet. First, I looked up scholarly articles and was able to see that I was not the only person to have an interest of this study. I found six articles about different aspects of how an older person might use the internet. Looking at these articles also made me see what older people struggled with. I took a little bit from each article to help me create my survey such as how older people struggle with using a mouse and how elders use internet for health. My first two questions on the survey were demographical information I wanted to find out the age of the people and see if there were differences between the outputs of different gender. One interesting finding in my research is that twenty-two men took my interview and twenty-two women so it was literally half and half. For my third question I wanted to find out how often these people were using the internet. Twenty two people answered 2-4 hours a day which was the highest. The least chosen was more than six hours a day, only 1 person answered that one.

My fourth question was asking which social network site do they use the most. The top answer picked was “Google+” nineteen people choose this answer. The least chosen answer was LinkedIn. One of the choices was never and other, twelve people circled never and one person circled other and wrote “MapQuest” which I found very interesting because most people would not consider that option as a social network. My fifth question was asking if they felt it was easy to use a computer. Thirty people chose yes that it was easy to use a computer, nine said they felt neutral and only five said no it is not easy to use a computer. The sixth question asked what sites do the use the most. The top answer was email; forty-one of the people chose this answer. The answer that was picked the least was other, it was picked twice. People added eBay and research. The last question was about changes they would make to improve internet communication. Only twenty-two people actually answered this question but I grouped the questions based of similarities. Some of the most common answers had to do with bigger text, better security, voice activation, and many said it should be more User friendly.

One of the reasons it was easy for me to talk to these older people and set up interviews without a problem is because I live in a small town and I help out with the community a lot, so for me it was simple to have interviews with older people. The first interview did not go as well as I expected. I interviewed a seventy-five year old female that lives on my street. She has never owned a computer so it was a very quick interview she just said no to everything I asked. But toward the end of the interview she mentioned using a computer at the library and after forty-five minutes her time would be over and the computer would lose everything she was looking for or she would lose data. Since she has experienced these negative incidents with computers she does not care to ever own or use one. The second interview went well but had an unexpected turnout. I interviewed a woman who was born and lived much of her life in the Philippines. She uses the computer to email and contact family and has recently created a Facebook. She believes email is better than a telephone, which was one of my questions on the interview. While being interviewed about email the interviewee broke down crying about how she lost two sisters in the last three months and that she would often email  both of them. Another question on my interview was “do you use internet for health”? She just happens to be a nurse and says that the internet is a great way to contact medical groups, doctors, or find information on illnesses.

My third and fourth interviews were more like the first interview with no as a common answer. One thing I found interesting on both interviewees is that they recognize internet communication to be a very effective and important tool. Although they never use the internet or computers in general, they are a married couple that owns a janitorial business. They have their son do all the work on a computer; he is a very computer savvy SJSU graduate who does all the accounting and business work on the computer. Although business was not a question on my interview they explained how the internet is a great tool to run a business. The fourth interview was interesting because the lady I interviewed was a sixty-four year old female who is very computer savvy. She explained how having to use the computer at work had really pushed her into using a computer and being able to navigate through the internet. She explains how she tries to keep updated and be in the new. She uses email more than she uses a phone and has a Facebook. She uses the internet for cooking, travel, games, social networking, and paying bills. She enjoys using her computer every day and spends about six hours on the computer a day. Her husband, the sixth and final person I interviewed had very different responses. He relies on his wife to do everything on the computer and he has her print out things for him to read. He explained that he has never really experienced using a computer and never intends to. One of my interview questions was regarding smartphones and tablets. He once owned the kindle fire and extremely hated it so he gave it to his daughter.

I found the study to be very fun and interesting. I have learned much about how older people feel and how they operate computers. Most of them are interested and open to using the internet but they are afraid don’t realize how much more simple it is to operate a computer or navigate through the internet now then it was ten years ago. The results I have gotten prove that it is not as hard for these older generations to use this new technology, the more they use I the more they understand it and the more they understand the more they will like it. Most people who responded that they disliked using computers because they have had negative experiences and gave up.

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