From Digital Divide to Digital Equality: The Role of Learning in Older Singaporeans

The role of information and communication technology (ICT) in later life has received substantial attention, with continuous studies focusing on the digital divide for older persons. Literature usually defines and measures the digital divide by focusing on ICT accessibility, skills, and outcomes. This study attempted to expand this framework by further incorporating the role of learning for a more comprehensive perspective of understanding the digital divide at older ages.

We chose the case of Singapore, a society with the highest level of ICT accessibility in the world, to reveal the necessity of introducing this new dimension. With a sample of 2,545 older adults from the Lifelong Education for Aging Productively survey in Singapore, we utilized the latent class analysis (LCA) to categorize 16 indicator variables across 3 core dimensions of the digital gap in daily life: usage, utility, and learning.

The LCA revealed 4 distinct groups: adept users, intermediate users, basic users, and traditional users. 12.9% of older individuals in Singapore were classified as traditional users, characterized by only using landlines and mobile phones for communication with little learning motivation, uncovering a deeper digital gap in Singapore under the new scheme. Regression analyses further showed the strong impacts of socioeconomic status on these types of ICT users.

This study not only underscores the need to highlight the role of learning in understanding the evolving nature of the digital gap but also calls for more significant policy interventions to enhance ICT learning toward digital equity.