Diversity of Online Activities and Social Adaptability Among Older Chinese Adults: The Moderating Role of Health Status

Older adults with lower digital literacy face an elevated risk of being marginalized and excluded from the digitalized society. Despite an increasing number of older people going online, they are still disadvantageous compared to the younger generation, who fully immerse themselves digitally in every aspect of their daily lives. This study aims to understand the associations between the diversity of online activities and the social adaptability of older people. This study adopted a two-wave dataset from the China Longitudinal Aging Social Survey (CLASS) and examined 896 Internet users aged 60 and above (female: 49.11%). With a linear mixed model, this study found that older adults who engaged in more diverse online activities were more likely to report better adaptation to society (B = 0.25, 95% CI [0.15, 0.35], p < .001). Moreover, this effect was more pronounced among older adults with less ideal health status, indicating that using the Internet for more diverse functions had the potential to make up for the potential loss related to health decline (B = -0.17, 95% CI [-0.30, -0.04], p = .009). While current interventions mostly emphasize helping older adults stay connected with friends and families through online communication, this study implies that it is also important to expand older adults’ Internet use into multiple areas to make them feel more belonging to and excluded in this digitalized society.