I Never Imagined Grandma Could Do So Well with Technology!

Evolving Roles of Younger Family Members in Older Adults’ Technology Learning and Use

Xinru Tang
ACM CSCW
Published in
4 min readOct 26, 2022

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This blog post summarizes the paper “I Never Imagined Grandma Could Do So Well with Technology”: Evolving Roles of Younger Family Members in Older Adults’ Technology Learning and Use by Xinru Tang, Yuling Sun, Bowen Zhang, Zimi Liu, RAY LC, Zhicong Lu, and Xin Tong presented at the 25th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW).

An older Chinese male was using a smartphone with a large screen display at his home. He was sitting on a wooden chair.
One of our participants was showing us his smartphone.

Key Takeaways

  • Older adults’ technology learning and use should be treated as a collaborative activity with family members that requires long-term relationship building and maintenance.
  • Younger adults’ unfamiliarity with older adults’ learning abilities and digital literacy may make them struggle to evolve teaching strategies.
  • Older adults may be far more capable of technology use than many younger people assumed. Out of a desire for protection, younger adults may start to check and even control older adults’ technology use when they find older adults are far more active online than they expected.
  • A special cultural context of “Xiao/XiaoShun” (usually translated into “filial piety” in English) has shaped a unique family support pattern in China and possibly similar cultures practicing filial piety (e.g., Latin America, Asia). Our findings challenge the Western model emphasizing older adults’ strong preferences toward independent learning of technology.

Older adults often face challenges in technology learning and use, especially nowadays when new technology is constantly evolving. Intuitively, younger family members are among the major sources of support for older adults’ technology use. However, the support process is often challenging due to difficulties in teaching, disagreements regarding technology use, etc. In this study, we dive deep into family dynamics during older adults’ technology learning and use. We interviewed 20 older adults and 18 younger adults in China, including 9 families, and uncovered a typical family support pattern as below.

The figure shows a typical family support pattern in older adults’ technology learning. There are three stages in older adults’ learning, that is, adoption, onboarding, and maintenance. These three stages are recurrent because older adults may explore new devices, applications, or features during their technology use. In this process, younger adults play as influencers, supporters, protectors, and some may even become monitors.
A typical family support pattern in older adults’ technology learning and use was uncovered in our study.

The process above calls attention to the challenges and tensions in family support that have received relatively little attention before. In particular, the younger people we interviewed tend to show low expectations toward older adults’ technology learning and use. For instance, one younger adult participant told us how she had strong concerns about teaching her grandmother to use a smartphone,

“I expected her to be unable to understand (how to use a smartphone even) after one or two years, but she was able to use the smartphone after only two or three months.”

Such a gap between younger people’s expectations and older adults’ actual use of technology often causes challenges and tensions in the support process.

Another older adult participant told us her daughter even asked her to hand in her smartphone for regular checks because her daughter was concerned about her online security and benefits. Initially, she felt uncomfortable with her daughter’s control out of privacy concerns, but she came to see the benefit of her daughter’s involvement,

“I told myself this (the checking and controlling behavior of her daughter) is “XiaoShun” from my daughter. Actually, I have nothing to hide on my phone. If she can help me identify misconduct online, that would be beneficial.”

The older adult participant in the above case said she now even proffers her phone to her daughter for review.

“XiaoShun” as mentioned by the participant, usually means respect, obedience, and care toward older family members in Chinese. It is usually translated into “filial piety” in English, representing an authoritative hierarchical parent-child relationship. Under the influence of such a cultural context, older adults may feel comfortable receiving care from younger family members. Older adults in China may also not see asking for help from younger family members as a burden to them, as is usually reported in North America and Western Europe. Similar patterns may appear in other cultures practicing “filial piety", such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.

With these findings, we show the potential of fostering a long-term cooperative relationship between older adults and their younger family members to support older adults’ technology learning and use. We envision future collaborative systems among older adults, younger family members, and other stakeholders (e.g., volunteers and local communities) to support older adults’ technology use. In countries featured by Western cultures, such as the U.S., people also show care towards their older family members’ technology use [1].

These are only some of the most significant findings of our work. If you are interested in our work, please check out our paper! ⬇️ ⬇️ ⬇️

Xinru Tang, Yuling Sun, Bowen Zhang, Zimi Liu, RAY LC, Zhicong Lu, and Xin Tong. 2022. “I Never Imagined Grandma Could Do So Well with Technology”: Evolving Roles of Younger Family Members in Older Adults’ Technology Learning and Use. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 478 (November 2022), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555579

[1] Tamir Mendel and Eran Toch. 2019. My Mom was Getting this Popup: Understanding Motivations and Processes in Helping Older Relatives with Mobile Security and Privacy. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 3, 4, Article 147 (December 2019), 20 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3369821

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ACM CSCW
ACM CSCW

Published in ACM CSCW

Research from the ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work and social computing

Xinru Tang
Xinru Tang

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