Digital by default? Older adult citizens and digital welfare interfaces

Sweden’s Digital First is a national strategy that gives preference to digital communication as a means of contact between citizens and the welfare service.

Digital First maintains that digital channels “ought to be default choice in public sector contacts with individuals and organizations.” However, little is known about how the initiative affects elderly citizens’ encounters with welfare.The project critically analyses and contributes to understanding and improving older adult (65+) users’ encounters with digital welfare interfaces.

The overall purpose is to clarify the challenges older adults face when using digital welfare interfaces and to suggest strategies for improvement.Focusing on interfaces that are particularly important to elderly citizens – pensionsmyndigheten.se (state: administration of pensions, 1177.se (region: healthcare) and municipal interfaces (care) – the project uses mixed methods (multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography, reception analysis and vignette experiments) to analyse welfare interfaces and older adults’ understanding and use of them.The applicants are experts in the different methods and are responsible for the project’s realization in accordance with integrated work packages.

At all stages, the research team cooperates with a research circle of stakeholders from civil society and governmental agencies.

The project contributes to theoretical and methodological development and empirical insight, and to future development of interfaces.