Aquilina Fueyo Gutiérrez

Redes sociales y mujeres mayores: estudio sobre la influencia de las redes sociales en la calidad de vida

This article attempts to deepen our knowledge concerning the use that elderly women make of social networks and how this relates to their quality of life. It deals with a collective often ignored by society both from an academic and political perspective. In addition, it does through the absolutely contemporary viewpoint of the participation in social networks. The theoretical framework is determined by the web 2.0, the digital gap and the digital gender gap, and the active aging and the quality of life. It is a qualitative study which involves a purposive sampling with eight typical cases, whose profile is women over 55 years old, resident in Asturias, carers and social networks users. There use of ICT is not related to the employment or to their academic career. We conducted five in-depth interviews and formed one heterogeneous focus group made of three of the aforementioned women and three specialists in equality and ICT. The review of data in the light of the analysis categories concludes that access to internet and social networks improves the quality of life in elderly women and the reached results contribute to the definition of relevant ideas to the public policies to encourage equality in the access of elderly women to social networks.