Log on and Prosper? Little Evidence for Codevelopment Between Psychological Adjustment and Technology Use in Older Adulthood.
OBJECTIVES
Researchers have hypothesized that using Information and Communications Technology (ICT), such as e-mail and social media, may buffer older adults from normative age-graded declines in psychological adjustment. However, past intervention research has been unable to conclusively evaluate this proposition, and no studies to date have examined this topic using naturalistic large-scale longitudinal methods.


METHOD
In this preregistered study, we examined the codevelopment between three aspects of psychological adjustment (loneliness, satisfaction with life [SWL], and depressiveness) and three factor-analytically derived clusters of ICT use (instrumental, social, and media) using a longitudinal representative sample of 2,922 Dutch adults aged 65 and older that contributed data annually from 2012 to 2017.


RESULTS
Latent growth curve analyses indicated that ICT use was largely unrelated to psychological adjustment, both cross-sectionally and longitudinally. Of 36 associations tested, three were significant, and only one remained significant after including health and demographic covariates. Specifically, higher levels of media ICT use at baseline predicted steeper declines in SWL across the study period. Furthermore, results of random-intercept cross-lagged analyses indicated that change in ICT use did not predict future change in psychological adjustment, and vice versa.


DISCUSSION
Results of this study help clarify the mixed results of past intervention research, indicating that effects of ICT use on psychological adjustment tend to be either null or much smaller than can be detected using typical intervention sample sizes. Overall, these results suggest that the association between technology use and psychological adjustment is negligible in older adults.
['Schwaba|Ted|T|', 'Bleidorn|Wiebke|W|']
D000368:Aged D000369:Aged, 80 and over D000375:Aging D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies D003863:Depression D000066498:Emotional Adjustment D005260:Female D006801:Humans D000084362:Internet Use D008132:Loneliness D008137:Longitudinal Studies D008297:Male D009426:Netherlands D010549:Personal Satisfaction
Loneliness Satisfaction with life Depressiveness Personality development