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Having the necessary skills for staying in contact with friends and relatives through digital devices is crucial in today’s world. As the current COVID-19 pandemic shows, this holds especially true for the elderly. Being quarantined and restricted from physically meeting people, various communication technologies are more important than ever for staying social and informed on current events. In nursing homes, staff members are now finding new ways for staying in touch with family members by assisting residents in making video calls with mobile devices.
But what if elderly people cannot rely on personal assistance for accessing these alternative means of communication? This raises the general question of how older people can and do learn to use such technologies. Although the internet is full of guides and instructional videos on how to use smartphones or tablets, they are a cold comfort to someone who may not even know what an internet browser is.
Especially for digital newcomers, the tried and true method of face-to-face instruction is invaluable. While many older people turn to their children or grandchildren for help in all things digital, courses specifically tailored for elderly users are also increasingly popular.
More and more governmental initiatives and associations indeed acknowledge the already existing interest of elderly citizens in digital tools and their growing need to receive customized training (e.g. “SeniorSurf” and “Kansalaisen digitaidot” in Finland or “Silver Tipps” in Germany). For a researcher of social interaction, these courses can also provide a valuable window for discovering what it looks and sounds like to learn to use essential but sometimes alien technologies.
Older adults are often exposed to elderspeak, a specialized speech register linked with negative outcomes. However, previous research has mainly been conducted in nursing homes without considering multiple contextual conditions. Based on a novel contextually-driven framework, we examined elderspeak in an acute general versus geriatric German hospital setting. Individuallevel information such as cognitive impairment (CI) and audio-recorded data from care interactions between 105 older patients (M = 83.2 years; 49% with severe CI) and 34 registered nurses (M = 38.9 years) were assessed. Psycholinguistic analyses were based on manual coding (k = .85 to k = .97) and computer-assisted procedures. First, diminutives (61%), collective pronouns (70%), and tag questions (97%) were detected. Second, patients’ functional impairment emerged as an important factor for elderspeak. Our study suggests that functional impairment may be a more salient trigger of stereotype activation than CI and that elderspeak deserves more attention in acute hospital settings.
Auf der Grandlage eines Drei-Generationen-Modells (Jugend, mittlere Generation, Alter) wird dargestellt, welche Anlässe es für alte Menschen zur Kommunikation mit Angehörigen der eigenen wie auch der anderen Generationen gibt. Dabei wird nach familiären, institutionellen und freien Kommunikationssituationen differenziert. Jede Konstellation wird in Hinblick auf Quantität und Qualität der Kommunikation sowie auf mögliche Erschwernisse und Probleme, insbesondere auch als Folge von körperlichen Gebrechen, charakterisiert. Auf diese Weise entsteht ein Bild des „kommunikativen Haushalts“ (Luckmann) der älteren Generation, das auf Schwachstellen hin überprüft wird. In einem letzten Schritt wird skizziert, welche Möglichkeiten zur Intensivierung der intra- wie der intergenerationellen Kommunikation bestehen.