Digital Divide Among the Korean Elderly People

Background/Purpose:

• This study aimed to explain the causes of digital divide in the elderly people in Korea and to provide recommendations for improvement. South Korea is known as one of the world best-developed ICT technologies, digital device supplies. Because pritnear Korean civil administration services approach are based on internet, elderly who could not use the Internet, they are easy to be alienated from online social activities and political participation. Generally, it is known as Internet access is strongly correlated with various socio-demographic dimensions such as income, education, gender and especially ‘age’ (Zickuhr and Smith, 2012; Paek, etc, 2015; Thomas. N., 2016; Seo, 2014; Joe, 2014). In this study identified the effect of age, education level, income, and gender on information gap and analyzed in terms of the number of digital devices, PC and Internet, ability to utilize smartphones, and Internet usage time.

 Methods:

• Data and samples: We used 2016 Age Integration survey data collected from Korean who are aged 20 and over.

• This study used data from Social Science Korea (SSK) survey, a project initiated by Korean government to collect data on different social indicators. 1,017 individuals over 20 years old were included in this study. This study includes 3 dependent variables. First is number of digital devices’, Second is ‘digital skills scores’ measured with 21 questions asking respondents’ capacity of digital software and hardware refer to Korean Information Gap Index (2015). Third, Time spent using digital devices using daily average hours. Covariates included demographic variables such as age, gender, education and income.

Results:

• The accessibility of digital equipment improves with the expansion of smartphone use. However, 12.4% of elderly men, 14.2% of elderly women are still cannot use smartphone, the gap in digital utilization capacity turned up still getting no better. In a regression analysis of all age groups, by controlling age, education, income and gender do not affect the number of digital equipment. However, the regression results (which is controlled income and education) separating genders for seniors older than 65 shows that elderly men have less digital equipment, low digital skills with ageing. Digital skills of elderly men are influenced by education while elderly women are affected by income level. The statistical results shows some interesting results that the variables which has been related with information gap variables such as age, education, income don’t explain causality sufficiently in elderly women group. To this group, private relationship such like family has much bigger impact on information gap than traditional ones.

Conclusions and Implications:

• Information gap appears significantly different depending on age, education, gender and then the impact power is difference in terms of accessibility, manipulation capability, and utilization level. The information gap problem of the ‘elderly’ is bit more serious. This study suggest that the practical policy which can eliminate mobile digital divide should be customized as considering the characteristics of each target group.