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Methodology for Establishing a Community-Wide Life Laboratory for Capturing Unobtrusive and Continuous Remote Activity and Health Data
Published on: July 27, 2018
Data talk: Mapping older Canadians' understandings of digital technologies and their data
Nicole K Dalmer1, Cal Biruk2, Stephanie Hatzifilalithis3
1Department of Health, Aging and Society, Canada; Gilbrea Centre for Studies in Aging, McMaster University, Canada.
None:
Older adults' experiences with technologies and data are typically flattened amid a focus on the functionalities of "techno-fixes" for the "afflictions" of later life. In this paper, we challenge this narrow focus by presenting older adults' own understandings of and experiences with data. Reporting on an online qualitative survey with 70 older Canadians, we argue that rather than being passive agents amid datafication, older adults are agentively theorizing, tinkering with, and engaging with data and devices. Organizing our analysis around three thematic threads (data associations, affordances and pitfalls of data, and data in relation to the aging self) we reveal how older adults vernacularize circulating discourses about data, producing their own meanings and interpretations. This paper also demonstrates the methodological potential of online surveys for collecting unexpectedly rich qualitative data. Our 'conversations' with respondents deepened our understandings of older adults' own perspectives, jargon, and terminologies around data and digital technologies and revealed the importance of considering data in relation to their devices.
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