Exploring urban empty-nesters' using WeChat influencing factors and quality of life: A qualitative descriptive study

Impact of digital literacy on aging attitudes of the elderly from the perspective of social cognitive theory

BACKGROUND

Under the background of digital economy, increasing awareness of active ageing through digital literacy is a realistic requirement to deal with deep aging. However, the lack of digital literacy and skills of the elderly seriously affects the ways and means of their participation in the digital society, and then produces negative aging attitudes such as loneliness, isolation and uselessness.

METHODS

We adopt stratified sampling to conduct a comprehensive social survey on the elderly care status of the elderly in six provinces including Henan, Hubei, Shaanxi, Gansu, Jiangsu and Shandong in July 2023, and use Ordinal Logistic Regression method to analysis the impact of digital literacy on aging attitudes.

RESULTS

The study finds that the improvement of digital literacy can significantly inhibit the aging attitude of the elderly. Further, mechanism analysis finds that the improvement of digital literacy has empowerment effect and energizing effect. In addition, compared with the urban, high-income and low-age elderly groups, the aging attitudes of rural, low-income and high-age elderly groups are relatively less dependent on digital literacy.

CONCLUSIONS

The improvement of digital literacy can significantly inhibit the aging attitude of the elderly, so the government should optimize the balance and accessibility of digital resources and eliminate digital inequality among the elderly.

The preferences for the telemedicine and standard health care services from the perspective of the patients with schizophrenia

BACKGROUND

With the rapid development of telemedicine, has enabled new and various ways to deliver health care services for patients with schizophrenia. However, it is not clear that the newly emerged is better than the standard or not from the perspective of patients with schizophrenia. This study aims to explore their preferences between telemedicine and standard health care services and their associated factors.

METHODS

The cross-sectional study was conducted at the Ningan hospital's inpatient department in Yinchuan, and collected socio-demographic and clinical information, the preferences regarding telemedicine (WeChat, telephone, and Email), and the standard health care services (community health center and home visit). The socio-demographic and clinical characteristics associated with the five-health care service delivery ways were assessed by descriptive analysis, and the associated impact factors of preferences of patients with schizophrenia were analyzed by multiple logistic regression.

RESULTS

Among the 300 participants, most of them chose WeChat (46.3%), some of them tended to telephone (35.4%) and community health center (11.3%), and a few of them accepted home visits (4.7%), and Email (2.3%). There are so many associated factors that affected the patients with schizophrenia to choose their favorite health care services, of which age, gender, employment, residence, and duration of illness were the independent impact factors.

CONCLUSIONS

The cross-sectional study surveyed the preferences between telemedicine and standard health care services in patients with schizophrenia's opinion, disclosed independent impact factors, as well as compared the advantage and disadvantages of these. According to our findings, the best health care services should be based on the preferences of the patients with schizophrenia and adapt to realistic conditions. This provides valuable evidence to improve the health care situation, facilitate the continuity of health care services, and achieve holistic rehabilitative outcomes for the patients with schizophrenia.