Digital tool accessibility and obstacles for people 60 and over in France?

How do researchers study use of digital tools by over-60s?

We can obtain information on this age bracket through quantitative surveys such as CREDOC’s Digital Barometer (CREDOC: Research center for the Study and Observation of Living Conditions) and INSEE’s TIC (Information and communication technologies) survey, conducted annually since 2007. We also have a corpus of interviews; for example, 120 interviews from France’s national research agency’s “Longitudinal Study on Aging and Social Inequality,” conducted in 2022 in seven contrasting areas of metropolitan France with respondents spanning three generations (born 1955-59, 1945-49, and 1935-39) with a variety of social-demographic profiles. 

Does the research find inequalities in these age brackets by social background and individual characteristics, and if so, of what magnitude?

That’s a very important point, because there is a tendency to speak about older people as if they were a homogeneous group, whereas in fact there are considerable disparities in digital use, associated with classic social determinants. According to the 2021 TIC survey, 67% of people 60 and over used internet in the last three months. But the rate varies greatly by a number of classic socio-demographic variables. Digital use is lower among older generations, rises with educational attainment, is higher among former managers (91%) and mid-level occupations (80%) than former office workers (64%), who in turn use internet more than former manual workers (50%) and agricultural workers (38%). These social-class differences are also related to type of occupation or skills: managers and mid-level professions have undergone much more thorough “digital socialization” than manual workers, who have often not been socialized at all in the use of digital tools in the workplace; they associate computers with an alien world, that of “offices.” 

What about differences between men and women in that age bracket? 

Quantitatively the gender difference is not as sharp: 68% of men aged 60 or over and 65% of women in the same age bracket used internet in the 3 months preceding the survey. This slight difference is due first of all to the fact that women are not less socialized than men in work-related digital tool use. Clearly some women in the afore-cited age bracket do not work, and there are considerably more male than female managers.

Moreover, work is not the only place to become digitally socialized; there is also the family circle, a source of assistance that benefits women in particular since they are more implicated than men in maintaining family ties. And this type of digital learning continues after retirement. It involves a dual mechanism: becoming digitally socialized thanks to younger family members, who operate as mediators, encouraging their elders to use digital tools and technology and helping them do so; and becoming digitally socialized in order to remain in contact with family members—a often-cited motivation for learning how to use digital tools.

What happens in the case of people what do not use digital equipment or are not familiar with digital technologies?

They end up either finding a non-digital means of carrying out tasks (by speaking in person with the relevant personnel at relevant offices for administrative procedures) or delegating those tasks to a third party, often a family member. But when relatives are not available (due to geographic distance or family conflict, for example), older people may well ask someone else to step in, such as a home caregiver, a public service worker (whose work may or may not involve helping people with digital tools), or a professional helper who services they then pay for.

At the practical level, these kinds of assistance (assuming they can be had) enable people who do not use digital tools to access services that they would otherwise be deprived of. At the symbolic level, the assistance they obtain does little to overcome the fairly widespread feeling among people unfamiliar with digital tool usage that the society now requiring them to use technologies they do not master views them with contempt.