Division of digital labor: Partner support for technology use among older adults

Abstract

Older adults often assist one another in using digital technology and tend to prefer assistance provided at home. However, research has yet to examine how life partners in this age group support one another in using technology. We interviewed 50 older adults representing 25 couples in five countries about their sources of support when using the Internet. Partner support was more common than existing literature suggests and was motivated by in-home convenience, partners’ level of digital skills, and a desire to avoid burdening other network members. At odds with a one-way view of digital assistance, partners often helped each other in different domains of Internet use based on career experience and personal interest. Partner support could both aid and discourage self-sufficiency, depending on how assistance was provided. Studying couples helps clarify how older adults develop relationships of mutual aid and dependency out of the everyday (un)availability of technology support.

Social support for technology use is an important factor shaping who benefits from access to the Internet (DiMaggio et al., 2004; Micheli et al., 2020). Older adults tend to rely more than their younger counterparts on the support of others to learn and use digital technologies (Anderson and Perrin, 2017). In this study, we use the term digital technology to refer to the wide range of Internet applications as well as devices that connect to the Internet. Among more mature Internet users, confidence in access to help with technology is positively related to Internet use (König et al., 2018). In search of support, older adults turn to a variety of sources for assistance, from family and friends to colleagues and more formal sources such as help lines (Friemel, 2016; Hunsaker et al., 2019). While the image of a young family member assisting an older relative comes to mind, research has shown that older adults also give and receive support to and from one another, whether as friends, colleagues, or spouses and life partners (Hunsaker et al., 2020; Quan-Haase et al., 2017). The latter context for technology support—that provided within a couple—may be particularly salient given the preference that older adults often state for help provided at home (Friemel, 2016). Existing research has not paid significant attention to the dynamics involved in spousal support for technology use in this age group, the focus of this article.

We draw on interviews with 50 older adults in 25 heterosexual relationships to understand how spouses and life partners provide support to one another for digital activities. We conducted interviews with adults 60 years and above in five countries—the United States, Netherlands, Switzerland, Hungary, and Bosnia—and included a range of questions related to Internet uses and experiences, including instances where help was sought and provided by our respondents. Our findings reveal a number of motivations for seeking partner support; how divisions of digital labor emerge in partners’ support roles; the various positive and negative experiences of help and their implications for learning motivations; as well as the limitations of assistance exchanged within couples. We discuss the relationship of these findings for areas of concern to researchers who study older adults as well as Internet use and support more broadly.

Older adults and support for technology use

Older adults are increasingly going online (Anderson and Perrin, 2017; Center for the Digital Future, 2016) and putting the Internet to use for a variety of purposes (Hunsaker and Hargittai, 2018; Van Deursen and Helsper, 2015). While greater Internet use can contribute to loneliness and depression among some users (Bessière et al., 2010; Stepanikova et al., 2010), research on older adults has generally identified a range of benefits, such as increased social interaction, and cognitive stimulation, and lower depression (Cotten et al., 2014; Francis et al., 2018; Tsai et al., 2017). Nevertheless, gaps persist for older adults in terms of levels of Internet adoption in comparison to younger age cohorts (Anderson and Perrin, 2017; Friemel, 2016) and, significantly, also among older adults by differences of age, income, and level of education (Hunsaker and Hargittai, 2018). These axes of difference influence not only older adults’ adoption of the Internet (Anderson and Perrin, 2017; Friemel, 2016), but also levels of digital skills (Hargittai et al., 2018; Hofer et al., 2019) and the breadth of their Internet uses (Van Deursen and Helsper, 2015; Yu et al., 2016).

As older adults expand their online presence, demand for support, particularly in setting up and learning new technologies, remains high (Anderson and Perrin, 2017). Technology assistance can be understood as a form of social support exchanged within interpersonal networks, and in particular, as a “small service” or provision of expertise between ties (Quan-Haase et al., 2017). Across age groups, access to assistance in using technology is a factor shaping whether people adopt the Internet and the extent to which they use it (DiMaggio et al., 2004; Micheli et al., 2020). More mature adults who report having such support are more likely to use the Internet than those who report no such support (Friemel, 2016; König et al., 2018). Having assistance when learning to use the Internet may also help mitigate the risks of Internet use, such as the concerns for digital security which are higher among older adults (Hill et al., 2015; Hunsaker et al., 2020).

Older adults gather support for technology use from a variety of sources. These include formal avenues such as computer stores and information technology (IT) help lines, as well as informal ones, such as through family members and friends (Hunsaker et al., 2019; Quan-Haase et al., 2018). Those who are retired are likely to lack the same degree of institutional support that those in the workforce or who are attending school may enjoy (Selwyn, 2003). Family and friends tend to play a larger role in supporting older adults’ technology use than for younger groups (Friemel, 2016; Schreurs et al., 2017; Selwyn, 2004). Intergenerational support is common, with older adults often turning to adult children and grandchildren for assistance with learning new technologies and for ongoing use (Francis et al., 2018).

The presence of younger family members at home is a common avenue for more mature adults to secure help using the Internet (Francis et al., 2018). However, such support is not always available and older adults often report avoiding asking family members for aid at risk of feeling “cumbersome” to them (Hunsaker et al., 2019). More mature Internet users might also seek out support from one another to avoid fitting the stereotype of being older and lagging behind in information and communications technology (ICT) skills when requesting help from younger users (Schreurs et al., 2017). In addition, older adults have preferences for how to learn to use technology (Friemel, 2016) and a lack of alignment with these preferences may result in negative experiences with family members, leading to an abandonment of future efforts to find support from the same sources (Peek et al., 2016). Indeed, research suggests that older adults are often content to teach themselves technologies by “playing around” with devices and applications in between instances of getting assistance from others (Hunsaker et al., 2019; Tsai et al., 2017).

Social support for technology use is a key factor in older adults’ adoption and use of the Internet and this age group turns to a variety of avenues when needing computer and Internet help. However, formal and informal sources of assistance, such as IT support at a place of work and younger family members, may not always be available or desirable. In this context, other older adults, including life partners, may be a significant source of assistance.

Support among older adults: the case of couples

While common perceptions assume that younger generations are the primary source of support for those who are older, research points to the significance and variety of technology assistance exchanged among older adults (Birkland, 2019; Francis et al., 2018; Hunsaker et al., 2020). Peers are often listed as the preferred source for technology help in this age group (Friemel, 2016). Among peer groups, “authorities” or “super users” tend to stand out, providing a good deal of assistance to those with less experience and gaining satisfaction from their roles as such (Tyler et al., 2018). In other cases, support is reciprocal among older adult friends and colleagues, rather than a one-way flow of help (Hunsaker et al., 2020). Professional backgrounds are an important factor in shaping who is able to provide help to others in their older age (Hunsaker et al., 2020).

The assistance that members of a couple exchange has received less attention in the literature on older adults and technology use. Couples have been included as examples of peer support more broadly, though not examined uniquely (Friemel, 2016; Hunsaker et al., 2020). Technology help provided within a partnership may be particularly salient considering that sources outside the home are often unavailable or undesirable, including from formal avenues and preferred sources such as younger family members (Hunsaker et al., 2019). The benefits of Internet use and knowledge on the part of one member of a couple appear to spill over to the other member, as having a spouse that uses the Internet increases one’s own likelihood of Internet use (Friemel, 2016; König et al., 2018; Seifert et al., 2017). However, a study from the early 2000s found that while 13% of older adults in the sample had a partner who used the Internet, only 8% asked for help from their partner to learn to use the Internet (Selwyn, 2003). Thus, older adults may also avoid seeking out help from their significant other, though the reasons for this are not yet explored in the literature.

A number of dynamics are significant in exploring the role of life partners in Internet use and learning among older adults. First, it is important to understand what motivates older adults to seek support from their partners in relation to other potential avenues. The mere physical presence of a cohabitating partner at home may make them a primary source of support, in line with research showing that more mature adults prefer help provided for them at home, whether from family or friends (Friemel, 2016). Asking for help from spouses may also fit with older adults’ expressed desire to avoid “burdening” younger family members such as children and grandchildren (Hunsaker et al., 2019). Beyond convenience or the desire to avoid burdening other family members, the superior level of digital skills that one’s significant other possesses may be an additional reason to seek them out for help. Members of a couple may also receive a particular enjoyment from solving technical issues together, though these potential motivations have not been explored in the literature.

Experiences and outcomes of partner support are also important to explore as part of the broader implications for older adults’ technology attitudes and uses. Negative experiences may result from a mismatch between the preferred and offered learning style (Peek et al., 2016) or from teaching versus only performing a support task (Hunsaker et al., 2019). In addition, the persistent availability of one’s partner at home may also lead to an overwhelming number of support requests, which may lead couples to avoid asking for help from one another in the future (Poole et al., 2009). The consistent availability of someone to help with technology may build confidence in experimenting with new Internet uses. At the same time, the consistent and convenient presence of a more-skilled technology user may de-motivate self-learning. Partners who only receive rather than also provide support may remain “proxy users” of the Internet, accessing online services only through their more-skilled partners (Friemel, 2016). Proxy use involves going online on behalf of someone else (Reisdorf et al., 2021) and correlates with lower digital skills compared to learning to use technology through formal avenues or by teaching oneself (Selwyn et al., 2016). Thus, the way that assistance is provided and experienced may go beyond the moment of help and shape a broader development of older adults couples’ digital know-how and range of Internet uses.

Methods

This study is part of a larger project that interviewed older adults in several countries about their communication practices. We targeted adults who are 60 years of age and older, as that is a widely accepted definition of older adults (World Health Organization, 2015). The article analyzes interviews with members of the 25 couples that participated in the larger study.

Data collection

Interviews took place between December 2018 and March 2020 in the United States (US), Netherlands (NL), Hungary, Switzerland (CH), and Bosnia (December 2018 to January 2019 in Hungary, January 2019 in the Netherlands and Switzerland, June 2019 in Bosnia, and January to March 2020 in the United States ending before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic). The study met the ethical guidelines of the Canton of Zurich for conducting research. Interviews were administered by the second author and additional members of the research team in the preferred languages of respondents (including English, Dutch, Hungarian, Swiss German, and Bosnian). We recruited respondents initially through the social networks of team members and then using snowball sampling from those who had already participated. By studying couples living in five countries, we include a greater range of experiences than are typically studied on the subject of technology support. While there are differences across these countries such as levels of Internet penetration (higher in the United States, Netherlands, and Switzerland than in Hungary and Bosnia), we do not have enough cases from each to compare them systematically, a matter we return to in the discussion.

Interviews were semi-structured; interviewers asked the same set of questions to each respondent, but also asked unscripted follow-up questions and allowed respondents to elaborate on related topics. Interviews lasted on average 54 minutes and varied in length from 18 to 109 minutes, with variation in length typically reflecting different levels of engagement with digital technology. We included shorter interviews where digital technology use was typically lower among participants in order to understand reasons for non-use. Interviews took place in respondents’ homes as well as public places such as cafes and restaurants. We preferred the latter more neutral settings for interviews though conducted many interviews at participants’ homes to respect their preference for a convenient setting. Interviews were conducted individually with each respondent without the significant other present.

Team members audio-recorded each interview with the permission of respondents. All non-English-language interviews were translated into English for the coding process, as English is the common language of the research group. Each respondent completed a brief self-administered survey to gather basic data about sociodemographics (age, gender, education, marital status, employment status, and household size) and respondents’ Internet experiences and skills.

Sample characteristics

The sample includes 25 couples amounting to 50 individuals. All couples are heterosexual and all were married or living with their partner. While all couples were heterosexual, we did not recruit based on sexual orientation. Respondents ranged in age from 58 to 84 (x = 70, SD = 6.3). The two respondents who were below 60 years at the time of the interview had partners who were above 60 years and themselves were turning 59 and 60 years, respectively, within a few weeks of their interviews. A little over half (54%) of respondents had a college degree, somewhat less than a third (30%) had some college education, and the rest less. Over two-thirds (68%) were retired at the time of the interview. Out of the 25 couples, 10 were living in the United States, five in the Netherlands, four each in Switzerland and Hungary, and two in Bosnia.

In terms of Internet experiences, all but one reported having been online for more than 5 years. The vast majority (94%) had Internet access at home and most had multiple locations of access. Respondents reported spending an average of just over 2 hours per day visiting web sites (other than email) and using social media. On the whole, the sample is diverse in many respects, but overall it is relatively well-connected for this age group.

Analytical and coding procedures

We began the data analysis through independent, open coding (Corbin and Strauss, 2015) of an initial 2–3 pairs of interviews, with each interview pair representing a couple. From this initial set of couples’ interviews, we identified coding categories around general themes such as whether couples exchanged support and whether that support was provided by both partners or only by one to the other. We coded each respondent’s interview separately but examined the interviews in pairs in order to analyze the couple as an additional unit of analysis beyond the individual. Following a first round of open coding, we used consensus meetings to compare coding categories arrived at independently and their justification from the data. We developed a coding scheme from these consensus meetings and used it to examine a further set of cases. We continued this pattern for several more sets of interviews, developing codes such as “division of support” and “efficacy of partner support” and revisiting previous interviews to adjust our coding according to the new scheme. We used a shared document to specify the meaning of each code and how it was to be applied, providing examples from the data, to ensure consistency between coders and across interviews (Babbie, 2005; Silverman, 2015). We coded the remainder of the 25 pairs of interviews based on the final scheme developed from the earlier rounds of coding.

We coded interviews in Microsoft Word using the Comments features to highlight relevant portions of the transcripts. We then exported the comments with related text to Microsoft Excel using the DocTools ExtractData add-in for MS Word (Fredborg, 2018). This provided a spreadsheet with excerpts from the transcripts organized by coding categories, from which we were able to develop the major findings of the study. Below, we report on the major themes that emerged from our coding.

Findings

Older adults in this study turned to a variety of sources when needing support in using technology and partners were common among them. Of the 25 couples we interviewed, respondents in 23 mentioned their partners as a source of assistance in some way. Below, we discuss the insights of the findings on various motivations, divisions in digital labor, and styles and experiences of helping one another with technology.

Before elaborating on experiences with partner support, it is worth acknowledging that partners were not always sources of help using technology. In two of the 25 couples, no mention was made of such assistance. Inexperience across both partners could mean neither was equipped to solve a technical issue, leaving other sources as the primary target for questions. “[My wife] doesn’t help that much because she’s also my age, but my sons, yes, [they help],” said one respondent (67 years, CH). Participants in our study also experienced undesirable outcomes from spousal support as the following example illustrates. A 71-year-old woman in the United States described shutting down her Facebook account shortly after registering for it. She had begun receiving a deluge of messages from unknown sources after opening the account. “I guess I didn’t have my privacy levels up where they should be. I should have sat down with my son instead of my husband to set up the account,” she said, referring to her husband as an insufficient avenue for help in this domain. Excluding these two couples, however, older adults in the study received assistance from their spouses.

Motivations for seeking partner support

Partners were a significant source of support for both the convenience of physical co-presence and because one or another possessed the necessary skills to address the problem at hand. The couples in our sample all lived together, making their co-located partner a primary target when seeking assistance. Convenience is apparent in the comments of one respondent (75 years, CH) who listed his wife and daughter as primary sources of support. When asked whom he turns to for help when using the Internet, he answered, “Whoever is there,” referring to his home. When asked what he does when no one is “there,” he responded, “Turn it off. Wait until [my wife] comes.” The role of convenience by physical proximity at home was clear in many other comments. “I mean, it would be [my husband] if I did [ask anyone for help], only because he’s right here,” said a 73-year-old woman in the United States. “If my wife is close by, I can ask her,” said a 67-year-old man in Switzerland.

Often respondents preferred another source of support, typically a younger family member. Phone calls and emails could be an avenue for assistance from such sources when they were not at home. Yet, there could be practical barriers to seeking out such help in the moment, such as different times zones between older adults and their children. “I don’t want to call him at two in the morning. He may not be too happy with me,” said a 62-year-old woman in the United States, whose son-in-law lived in Europe. In addition, older adult couples often intentionally avoided asking for support from these preferred sources. For example, a 78-year-old man in the United States also listed his son-in-law as a primary source of support for him and his wife. Although his son-in-law was useful for having more familiarity with technology, the couple did not often seek him out as they wanted to avoid being bothersome. “We try not to bug him because he’s knee-deep in his job,” the man explained. The lack of availability or desirability of getting support from preferred sources outside the home thus made partner support more attractive for couples.

While partners may be salient sources of assistance due to availability at home, higher digital know-how among one’s partner was an additional motivator. “Because he knows how,” replied one respondent (58 years, CH), when asked to explain why her husband was her primary source of digital help. Similarly, a 71-year-old man in the Netherlands referred to the relative expertise of his spouse:

My wife had worked with the Internet before. So, she is the wise one of us two. If I have a problem doing something, she can solve it, nine out of ten times. I immediately stand with my hands in the air. I have no idea what to do.

As indicated in the previous example, familiarity through earlier or longer experience in using the Internet was often a source of relative expertise. When asked if anyone helps him use the Internet, a 77-year-old man in Hungary replied, “Yes, my wife. She started using it before I did. Actually, in every way concerning the Internet, she was always before me.” Higher digital know-how appeared to be a motivator independent of physical availability in the case of the following participant, a 73-year-old man in Switzerland, who sought out his spouse by phone when she was not at home: “If I do have a problem, usually my wife is a little better than I am, and so I call her.” In sum, reasons for turning to one’s spouse for assistance when using the Internet included the convenience of physical proximity and thus ease of availability, as well as the spouse having more experiences and skills with related tasks so that the respondent was confident that they could get their questions answered quickly.

Division of digital labor

In the course of using technology and providing support to one another, partners also often developed responsibilities in their own domains of digital activity, a type of “division of digital labor.” This division of support applied to both who handled the use of technology for the couple in a particular domain—such as completing online banking transactions or making travel arrangements—as well as who provided the support in that domain for the other partner when issues arose. We observed such division of digital labor in 17 of the 25 couples interviewed in the study. Areas of technology use became one or the other partner’s responsibility out of personal interest, habit, or due to particular skills developed in one area.

In some cases, a separation of digital responsibilities appeared to develop out of individual motivations and the habits that followed. One respondent (62 years, NL) said that her husband always booked flight arrangements, while acknowledging that she could do so if needed. “That’s how those roles are divided. But if I had to, I would. But my husband does.” Another respondent (61 years, CH) referred to his wife’s personal interest in searching online for travel information, to account for his limited role in this domain: “Not much, that’s what my wife does. We come up with ideas and she goes surfing. Because she likes to do it very much.”

Partners also had skills in particular areas that made them domain “experts” and thus limited the extent of their spouses’ involvement in the area. For example, a 70-year-old man in the United States described the know-how his wife had in a domain where he needed help: “My wife will help me with some applications she’s more familiar with. She’s a little more up to date on video editing than I am. She’s going to help me with grabbing audio from YouTube.” Another respondent (62 years, US) described her husband’s relative expertise in the area of digital security: “My husband makes sure that we have the virus protection on the computers,” adding, “He can figure out things there better than I can. . . . He’s more aware of what we need that way, and so he helps me with that, makes sure things are secure.”

In some cases, employment provided a source of domain-specific knowledge and thus responsibility. One respondent (63 years, CH) was relatively uninvolved in travel arrangements due to her husband’s profession as a travel agent:

[My husband] is the expert . . . I don’t read reviews about [hotels] because he has read them all. Sometimes I look up where the shops are in the country, or if there is a museum or whatever . . . But most of the things [related to online travel planning], it’s his doing.

A US couple, both 66 years old, provide an example of how both skills and personal interests can contribute to a division of digital labor and support in a partnership. “We have very delineated tasks and it’s very much ‘divide and conquer’,” explained the woman. She compared the delineation of digital tasks to other household labor: “I do the laundry. He does the taxes.” The man began using the Internet for his work in the early 1990s when his wife was already retired. At the time, he helped her set up her first email account. The husband continues to be responsible for “technical stuff,” in his wife’s words, such as setting up a printer, signing a digital document, and troubleshooting the Internet connection. For finding and purchasing products online, however, the wife takes responsibility. “If he can’t find something online . . . he just writes it down and I just do it,” she says, referring to online purchases she makes for her husband.

In sum, most couples rely on their spouses for support in part because they develop a division of digital labor in a way that may discourage either party from becoming proficient at everything. While in many ways this can be efficient, in the “Discussion” section, we elaborate on the potential downsides of this approach to addressing digital technology needs among older adults.

Styles of support: proxy use, teaching, and learning together

In describing support exchanged with their significant other, participants referred to a range of related styles and attitudes toward the experiences. Prominent ways that couples supported each other include doing a task for one’s partner, which prior work has called “proxy use” (Reisdorf et al., 2021; Selwyn et al., 2016) and which is indicative of the division of digital labor described in the previous section. Partners could also provide support by teaching their spouse a skill or by working together to learn a task or competency. The style of support that was active for a particular couple could shape the broader confidence that one or both partners had in their ability to use and learn to use the Internet.

The first style in which one member of a couple assisted the other was to complete a task for them without involving the support-seeker in a meaningful way. This “doing for” style of support is active in the division of digital labor described earlier in cases where a lack of skills rather than a lack of interest motivates the assistance. This style of support is worth exploring here in comparison to other approaches and their relationship to learning inspirations. For example, a 62-year-old woman in the Netherlands reported that her husband took responsibility for ordering books online for her, as she was unable to figure out how to do so herself: “I often find it complicated [. . .] If I have to order something, then I think: ‘Ah, never mind’.” In this case, the “doing for” style of support made online services available to one who would otherwise not use them due to limited digital skills. However, doing a task for one’s partner might also preclude the chance for the latter’s learning. In these cases, it became clear that participants might have engaged in self-learning were it not for the availability of ongoing support in the form of a partner at home. One respondent (67 years, CH) had trouble remembering how to take photos and upload them to his computer, and thus turned to his wife for help rather than learning the skill himself. “I could figure it out,” the respondent explained, “But [asking my wife] is the easy way out.”

Teaching one’s partner how to do a digital task was an alternative to doing the task for them. “My husband sometimes says, ‘Well, how do you do this?’ And then I explain it to him, and that works,” said a 72-year-old woman in the Netherlands. Respondents learned through observation more often than through explicit instructions. A 73-year-old man in Switzerland described learning by observing:

Like yesterday, I had a PowerPoint presentation I prepared, and I had it on my USB stick. Then I asked [my wife] to help me put it in the computer . . . because she knows [how to do] that well. And now, watching her, I also know [how to do] it.

Teaching was not always effective, however, and failed attempts could negatively impact participants’ learning motivations. A 61-year-old woman in the Netherlands described how her husband assisted her on the computer. “It often goes so fast that I don’t see [how it works] myself,” she said. She continued, suggesting the broader negative influence of the experience on her digital motivations:

So, then I think, well, I don’t need to know everything. What I can do now, I’m completely satisfied with that, and I don’t have the feeling that I want [to do] more. Because it’s more than enough that you have to look at such a screen all the time.

In addition to teaching and demonstrating, older adults worked on tasks together that neither of them understood or provided encouragement for one another to learn. The first of these alternatives came in the form of learning or troubleshooting a task together, such as by sitting together on the same computer or device. One respondent (70 years, NL) said that his wife provided him help with online banking, as she had had more experience in that area. However, neither of them was familiar with using a particular online service that allowed them to store their login information across websites. “Then we do it together,” said the husband, “Because I don’t [use the service] that often, nor does she. Well, that’s how you come to a solution.”

Encouragement was another means of supporting a partner in learning to do a task for themselves and stands as an alternative to relying on one’s significant other. One respondent (63 years, US) described how his wife’s affirming words contributed to his learning process around changing his Facebook profile picture:

She took [a photo] at the beach [of me] and said it was a good picture, and [that I] ought to change it to [my Facebook] profile. And I said, “Well, I don’t know how to do that. I’ll have to get you to do it.” And then I followed the menu and did it. And she said, “I’m proud of you.”

Couples thus approached the task of assisting one another differently. While merely doing a task for one’s partner offered less in the way of motivation; teaching encouraging, and learning together appeared to spur self-confidence in one’s Internet use.

Discussion

Finding support for going online is an important condition of digital inclusion. The task is no simple matter, however, as support is not always readily available. More mature Internet users find themselves navigating a variety of more and less available and desirable sources. This study has explored life partners as an underexamined source of help for older adults’ technology needs. The limitations, motivations, divisions of labor, and different styles and experiences of support among the 25 couples in this study are evidence of the nuanced dynamics involved in this domain. We discuss here how these findings improve our understanding of social support for technology use for this and other populations more broadly, as well as the limitations of the study and what it suggests for future related research.

Our findings suggest that couples support is more common than previously identified in the literature. While the participants in our study did turn to younger family members for help, in line with existing research (Schreurs et al., 2017; Tsai et al., 2017), nearly all of the 25 couples interviewed in our study aided one another in their Internet uses in some way. Existing research may underemphasize partner support as older adults may be more likely to report on interactions that are more memorable and out of the ordinary, such as those with grandchildren. Our findings suggest that future research could pay greater attention to more mundane forms of support in addition to those likely to be more memorable for older adults.

Second, while assistance using technology is often needed among older adults, examining partner support makes clear that more mature Internet users do not mindlessly issue support requests to people in their network but rather refer to a set of implicit and explicit conditions for where they seek their aid. Existing research has observed older adults’ hesitations to ask for help from family outside the home (Hunsaker et al., 2019). Examining where older adults turn instead—in the case of our study, to their life partners at home—helps to illuminate the broader set of dynamics, including motivations as well as hesitations, involved in navigating social networks for technology support.

In particular, our findings point to the role of convenience (how easily support is accessed, including in person), expertise (who is most knowledgeable), and social dynamics (wanting to avoid being a burden) as factors shaping who is sought for help and how assistance is experienced. Physical co-presence and digital know-how draw partners toward each other as convenient and capable helpers for one another. Couples are less attracted to sources they often identify as more capable, such as younger family members, not only by the practical barrier of physical distance, but also by negative feelings such as concerns about being bothersome. These attitudinal barriers are confirmed by the finding that participants in this study also used the phone to request support from their partners even when those partners were not co-present at home. Our results suggest that partners are often the most comfortable making requests of one another, relative to other members of their support network. In this context, the prerogative is more often on emotional ease than it is related to the sheer know-how of the source of help. This is on display when our participants turned to their significant other though they knew more knowledgeable support was available through their children or grandchildren outside the home.

The data for this study are unique in representing the perspectives of both members of a couple. Through this method, not only one-way flows, but also a division of digital labor emerged as a feature. In some cases, this reciprocity of support was apparent in a single interview, as when participants told us the different areas of technology expertise held by them and their partner. In other cases, the ways that one or the other member of a partnership aided one another emerged only with both accounts, and would likely not have emerged by interviewing unrelated individuals.

The perspective available from interviewing both members of a supportive relationship allows for insight into the study of “proxy use” of the Internet as it relates to older adults. The phenomenon of going online on behalf of someone else is more commonly observed as a one-way flow of support, often by the younger assisting the older (Dolničar et al., 2018; Grošelj et al., 2019; Reisdorf et al., 2021). However, older adults may also become proxy users for one another, as evidenced by the participants in this study who turned over the responsibilities for some or all Internet activities to their partner.

While research on proxy use has typically examined the relationships of users to non-users of the Internet, as more older adults go online, the study of degrees of proxy use and divisions of uses may be more relevant. In our study, partners often divided up their support roles, assisting in and doing tasks for the other based on separate domains of expertise. In addition, past research has generally found proxy use to center on “transactional” Internet needs such as banking and shopping, rather than on social or leisure uses (Grošelj et al., 2019; Selwyn et al., 2016). However, video editing and other non-transactional uses of the Internet—one participant had his wife look up people for him on social media, as he did not have an account—were included among the duties that one partner handled for another among respondents in this study. Proxy uses may emerge differently among intimate partners whose lives overlap in more domains than among cross-generational instances.

The presence of both positive and negative implications of proxy use currently examined in the literature remain relevant when examining how partners in later life stages divide up their digital support roles. Better that a person has another individual use the Internet for them when needed than not to have any form of Internet access, though digital inclusion may be stymied by a reliance on others rather than learning oneself. The examination of different support styles among older adults shows how the process of assistance can both enable and hinder self-learning. In our study, older adults who felt involved and encouraged in the process of learning to use technology expressed a greater sense of motivation and self-efficacy toward their digital prowess and potential.

However, those who relied entirely on their partner for troubleshooting—or whose significant others approached support by “doing for” rather than teaching or co-learning—expressed a lack of motivation for further learning. Future research on proxy use, regardless of life stage, can benefit from examining degrees and domains of dependence as well as how supportive styles shape the potential for independence from a reliance on others to take advantage of the Internet. The social benefits of seeking help outside the home is another area for potential research growth. Previous work has noted that obtaining technology support can be an important motivator for older adults’ interactions with family and friends. Having a partner at home when Internet issues arise may limit this important “catalyst to connection” for this population (Francis et al., 2018).

The role of the home and the division of digital labor observed in this study suggest that future research on technology support could pay greater attention to domestication processes. Domestication research shows how technologies become meaningful in the context of everyday life with the home as a key setting (Haddon, 1992; Silverstone and Haddon, 1996). There is limited research connecting domestication to how people support one another in their technology uses. One study locates help for technology use within an initial “appropriation” phase of bringing technology into the home and getting to know it (Scheerder et al., 2019). In our study, exchanging support was a matter of roles and routines developed over time among people living together, such as the “expert” roles taken by spouses in a division of digital labor. In this sense, how people living together support one another in using digital devices is a part of the higher level process of technology “incorporation” (Silverstone and Haddon, 1996). Future research should focus on the home as a key setting of technology support through the lens of domestication research, while paying attention to the development of support roles in the long term for households of different types.

While gender differences have often emerged in Internet uses (Helsper, 2010; Martínez-Cantos, 2017), this was not the case for the supportive roles of couples in this study. For example, research has shown that men tend to express greater confidence in their Internet skills than women (Hargittai and Shafer, 2006; Lee, 2003; Owens and Lilly, 2017), which may lead to an imbalance in heterosexual couples for who seeks and provides support. Among our relatively highly educated sample, however, gender did not emerge as a prevailing theme. In couples where one member was presented as the primary provider of technology support, women and men were nearly equally represented. Women in nine couples were the main provider of support and men in eight. The remaining couples either exchanged support relatively equally (five couples) or did not provide each other support (two couples). One possible explanation for the gender balance is that in our sample, women and men showed no difference in their levels of digital know-how through an oft-used survey measure (Hargittai and Hsieh, 2012) that we collected as part of the brief survey accompanying the interviews. This mirrors others’ findings about no gender differences in Internet skills among older adults (Hargittai et al., 2018).

There are limitations to this study worth noting. Although our sample is diverse in terms of respondents’ national context, our interviewees were relatively well-educated and digitally connected compared to the broader population, which may have influenced our findings. For example, we found that respondents often turned to their partners for help with technology not only due to convenience but also for their partners’ possession of the necessary digital skills to aid them. The prevalence of support exchanged within couples may be lower among a population with lower education and income, as such a population may have fewer of the skills with technology necessary to aid one another.

Another limitation was that 25 couples were not enough cases for us to determine whether potential differences in support practices were a matter of cultural and national differences. Future research might improve on the goal of studying different country contexts through population surveys or interview questions designed toward this purpose. Finally, while our data capture certain tensions involved in partner support for technology use (e.g. in the mismatch between preferred learning style and the style of help received), there may be other frictions involved in these relationships (e.g. emotional strain related to support attempts) that we did not observe, since those were not experiences we had investigated.

Conclusion

This study has examined the nature and dynamics of support that couples in later life stages provide one another for technology use, focusing on the motivations, division of labor, styles, and limitations of such assistance. The ways that older life partners help one another differ and have broader implications for their reliance on or independence from others for using the Internet. A division of digital labor in these relationships points to a more complex arrangement of technology support among older adults than previously acknowledged. The study has implications for our understanding of how older Internet users seek out and experience avenues of support for technology use.

First, researchers should continue to examine the dynamics involved in the exchange of support among and not only for older adults. Particularly among age peers, who may be more likely to have similar degrees of digital know-how, it is important not to assume a one-way exchange of technology help. Instead, research should be prepared to observe reciprocity in supportive relationships and examine proxy use as a matter of degrees and ongoing trajectories rather than as a static, unidirectional phenomenon. Approaches that query multiple members of a network are one way to get at the more complex dynamics of technology assistance. Surveys could include items specifically addressed to the two-way potential for digital help. A more varied set of approaches and attention to nuances of support-giving for and among older adults will better represent the complexity with which more mature Internet users approach their digital lives. Finally, it is worth noting that these implications for future work should not be restricted to research on older adults’ technology support. Work on Internet users of all ages would benefit from similar dyadic approaches.