Intuitively, family members are important to support sources for older adults’ technology learning and use. However, family support is often challenging due to difficulties in teaching, disagreements regarding technology use, etc. To uncover the opportunities and challenges in family collaboration, we dived into the family dynamics during older adults' technology learning.
The work uncovered a typical family support pattern, which highlights the challenges and tensions in family support that received little attention. More specifically, we identified older adults’ three technological learning processes in three stages (Figure 1): adoption, onboarding, and maintenance. At the same time, the young generation's family members mainly play four roles in this process: "influencer", "supporter", "protector" and "monitor". Although these identities are diverse, they do not contradict each other and emphasize the different concerns of the young generation during the period of supporting the elderly to learn new technologies.
Our results also reveal the influence of Chinese culture on the support patterns among family members. Under the influence of China's "filial piety" culture, the elderly in China did not show excessive concern and were more willing to seek support from the younger generation in the process of learning technology products. This is not only because they regard the younger generation as experts in science and technology, but also because they think it is a manifestation of filial piety. At the same time, young family members in China often regard it as their responsibility to help the elderly learn technology products and protect their safety. Therefore, many of them will often pay attention to the daily use of science and technology products by the elderly and offer help on their own initiative. In addition, the shaping of the family support model is also affected by the socio-economic background.
