skip to main content
10.1145/3308561.3353807acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesassetsConference Proceedingsconference-collections
short-paper

Gender and Help Seeking by Older Adults When Learning New Technologies

Published: 24 October 2019 Publication History

Abstract

A gender stereotype that has some basis in research is that men are more reluctant to ask for directions than women. We wanted to investigate whether this stereotype applies to technology-related contexts, affecting older adults' abilities to learn new technologies. To explore how help seeking and gender might relate for older adults, we conducted a controlled experiment with 36 individuals, of whom 18 identified as men and 18 identified as women, and observed how often they asked for help when learning new applications. We also conducted post-experiment interviews with participants. We found that although most participants stereotyped older men as being reluctant to ask for help in the interview, the gender difference was minimal in the experiment. Instead, individual differences had a greater effect: older participants took longer to complete tasks and participants with lower technology self-efficacy asked significantly more questions.

Supplementary Material

ZIP File (sp010aux.zip)
This folder contains a pdf of the tasks used in the experiment.

References

[1]
Jeffrey C. Alexander. 2003. The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
[2]
Kristine M. Baber and Corinna Jenkins Tucker. 2006. The social roles questionnaire: A new approach to measuring attitudes toward gender. Sex Roles 54 (7--8), 459--467.
[3]
Laura Beckwith, Margaret Burnett, Valentina Grigoreanu, and Susan Wiedenbeck. 2006. Gender HCI: What about the software? Computer 39 (11), 97--101.
[4]
Namkee G. Choi and Diana M. Dinitto. 2013. Internet use among older adults: Association with health needs, psychological capital, and social capital. Journal of Medical Internet Research 15 (5), 1--27.
[5]
Siew Lian Chua, Der Thanq Chen, and Angela F. L. Wong. 1999. Computer anxiety and its correlates: A meta-analysis. Computers in Human Behavior 15 (5), 609--623.
[6]
Teresa Ciabattari. 2001. Changes in men's conservative gender ideologies: Cohort and period influences. Gender & Society 15 (4), 574--591.
[7]
Jacob Cohen. 1988. Statistical Power Analysis for the Behavioral Sciences. New York: Routledge.
[8]
Anne M. Colley, Matthew T. Gale, and Teri A. Harris. 1994. Effects of gender role identity and experience on computer attitude components. Journal of Educational Computing Research 10 (2), 129--137.
[9]
Joel Cooper. 2006. The digital divide: The special case of gender. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 22 (5), 320--334.
[10]
Alexander J.A.M. van Deursen and Ellen J. Helsper. 2015. A nuanced understanding of Internet use and non-use among the elderly. European Journal of Communication 30 (2), 171--187.
[11]
Glen H. Elder Jr. and Richard C. Rockwell. 1979. The life-course and human development: An ecological perspective. International Journal of Behavioral Development 2 (1), 1--21.
[12]
Rachel L. Franz, Ron Baecker, and Khai N. Truong. 2018. "I knew that, I was just testing you": Understanding older adults' impression management tactics during usability studies. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 11 (3), 1--23.
[13]
Rachel L. Franz and Barbara Barbosa Neves. 2019. Usability is ageless: Conducting usability tests with older adults. In Barbara Barbosa Neves and Frank Vetere (eds.), Ageing and Digital Technology: Designing and Evaluating Emerging Technologies for Older Adults. Singapore: Springer.
[14]
Rachel L. Franz, Barbara Barbosa Neves, Carrie Demmans Epp, Ron Baecker, and Jacob O. Wobbrock. 2019. Why and How Think-Alouds with Frail Older Adults Fail: Recommendations from a Study and Expert Interviews. In Sergio Sayago (ed.), Perspectives on Human-Computer Interaction Research With Older People. Springer.
[15]
Erving Goffman. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books. ISBN: 978-0--14-013571--8
[16]
Nancy Gourash. 1978. Help-seeking: A review of the literature. American Journal of Community Psychology 6 (5), 413--423.
[17]
Claire M. Hart, Timothy D. Ritchie, Erica G. Hepper, and Jochen E. Gebauer. 2015. The Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding Short Form (BIDR-16). SAGE Open 5 (4).
[18]
Baqar A. Husaini, Stephen T. Moore, and Van A. Cain. 1994. Psychiatric symptoms and help-seeking behavior among the elderly: An analysis of racial and gender differences. Journal of Gerontological Social Work 21 (3--4), 177--196.
[19]
Os Keyes. 2018. The Misgendering Machines: Trans/HCI Implications of Automatic Gender Recognition. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction - CSCW (2), 1--22.
[20]
Jeehoon Kim, Hee Yun Lee, M. Candace Christensen, and Joseph R. Merighi. 2017. Technology access and use, and their associations with social engagement among older adults: Do women and men differ? Journals of Gerontology - Series B Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences 72 (5), 836--845.
[21]
Kate Laver, Stacey George, Julie Ratcliffe, and Maria Crotty. 2012. Measuring technology self efficacy: Reliability and construct validity of a modified computer self efficacy scale in a clinical rehabilitation setting. Disability and Rehabilitation 34 (3), 220--227.
[22]
Eckhard Limpert, Werner A Stahel, and Markus Abbt. 2001. Log-normal distributions across the sciences: Keys and clues. BioScience 51 (5), 341--352.
[23]
Linda L. Lindsey. 2005. Gender Roles: A Sociological Perspective. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
[24]
Patricia Passuth Lynott and N. Jane McCandless. 2000. The impact of age vs. life experience on the gender role attitudes of women in different cohorts. Journal of Women & Aging 12 (1--2), 5--21.
[25]
Daniel L. Murman. 2015. The impact of age on cognition. Seminars in Hearing 36 (3), 111--121.
[26]
Sharon Nelson-Le Gall. 1985. Help-seeking behavior in learning. Review of Research in Education 12. 55--90.
[27]
Amy Ogan, Erin Walker, Ryan Baker, Maria Mercedes T. Rodrigo, Jose Carlo Soriano, and Maynor Jimenez Castro. 2015. Towards understanding how to assess help-seeking behavior across cultures. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 25 (2), 229--248.
[28]
Christine A. Padesky and Constance L. Hammen. 1981. Sex differences in depressive symptom expression and help-seeking among college students. Sex Roles 7 (3), 309--320.
[29]
Barbara J. Risman and Georgiann Davis. 2013. From sex roles to gender structure. Current Sociology 61 (5--6), 733--755.
[30]
L.D. Rosen, K. Whaling, L.M. Carrier, N.A. Cheever, and J. Rokkum. 2013. The media and technology usage and attitudes scale: An empirical investigation. Computers in Human Behavior 29 (6), 2501--2511.
[31]
J.C. van Swieten, P.J. Koudstaal, M.C. Visser, H.J.A. Schouten, and J. van Gijn. 1988. Interobserver agreement for the assessment of handicap in stroke patients. Stroke 19 (5), 604--607.
[32]
Fred Tudiver and Yves Talbot. 1999. Why don't men seek help? Family physicians' perspectives on help-seeking behavior in men. The Journal of Family Practice 48 (1), 47--52.
[33]
John Vines, Gary Pritchard, Peter Wright, Patrick Olivier, and Katie Brittain. 2015. An age-old problem: Examining the discourses of ageing in HCI and strategies for future research. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI) 22 (1), 1--27.
[34]
Kerryellen G. Vroman, Sajay Arthanat, and Catherine Lysack. 2015. "Who over 65 is online?" Older adults' dispositions toward information communication technology. Computers in Human Behavior 43. 156--166.
[35]
Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman. 1987. Doing Gender. Gender 1 (2), 125--151.
[36]
World Health Organization. 2014. Gender, women and health: What do we mean by "sex" and "gender." Geneva (CH): WHO. https://www.who.int/gender-equity-rights/en/

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Offering and Asking for Help with Domestic Chores in Couple RelationshipsInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph2004370820:4(3708)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Understanding Older Adults’ Safety Perceptions and Risk Mitigation Strategies when Accessing Online ServicesHCI for Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust10.1007/978-3-031-35822-7_31(467-491)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Toward Proactive Support for Older AdultsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35172496:1(1-25)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2022
  • Show More Cited By

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
ASSETS '19: Proceedings of the 21st International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility
October 2019
730 pages
ISBN:9781450366762
DOI:10.1145/3308561
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 24 October 2019

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. gender
  2. help seeking
  3. older adults
  4. technology use

Qualifiers

  • Short-paper

Funding Sources

  • Mani Charitable Foundation

Conference

ASSETS '19
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

ASSETS '19 Paper Acceptance Rate 41 of 158 submissions, 26%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 436 of 1,556 submissions, 28%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • Downloads (Last 12 months)41
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 20 Jan 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

Cited By

View all
  • (2023)Offering and Asking for Help with Domestic Chores in Couple RelationshipsInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health10.3390/ijerph2004370820:4(3708)Online publication date: 19-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Understanding Older Adults’ Safety Perceptions and Risk Mitigation Strategies when Accessing Online ServicesHCI for Cybersecurity, Privacy and Trust10.1007/978-3-031-35822-7_31(467-491)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Toward Proactive Support for Older AdultsProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/35172496:1(1-25)Online publication date: 29-Mar-2022
  • (2022)Accessibility-Related Publication Distribution in HCI Based on a Meta-AnalysisExtended Abstracts of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3491101.3519701(1-28)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2022
  • (2021)Examining Collaborative Support for Privacy and Security in the Broader Context of Tech CaregivingProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/34795405:CSCW2(1-23)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2021

View Options

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media