Status of online social interaction and its influence on depressive symptoms in theelderly
Objective To understand current status of online social interaction among the elderly in China,and to analyze the impact of online social interaction on depressive symptoms in the elderly.Methods The elderly aged 60 years and above were collected from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study 2018.Multivariate logistic regression mod-el was used to analyze the association between online social interaction and depressive symptoms in the elderly.Propensity score matching(PSM)was used to test the robustness and heterogeneity of health effects of online social interaction.Results A total of 4994 partipants were included in this study,10.69％of them had online social interaction and 26.47％of them had depressive symptoms.Multivariate regression analysis showed that elderly with online social interaction were less likely to have depressive symptoms than those without online social interaction(OR=0.581,95％CI:0.426-0.793,P＜0.05)after controlling other variables.The results of 1∶1 propensity score matching showed that online social interaction could im-prove the depressive symptoms of the elderly(ATT=-0.066,P＜0.05).Heterogeneity analysis showed that online social interaction could improve the depressive symptoms of the rural elderly(ATT=-0.083,P＜0.05),but not the urban eld-erly(ATT=-0.052,P＞0.05).The results were still robust after 1∶4 matching(ATT=-0.048,P＜0.05)and ker-nel matching(ATT=-0.052,P＜0.05).Conclusion Internet social interaction is beneficial to improve depressive symptoms in the elderly,and rural residents may be the main population with the health effects of Internet social interac-tion.In the process of social software development,governments and enterprises should pay attention to the aging transforma-tion of digital products,urban-rural differences and digital equity.
Online social interactionDepressive symptomsLogistic regressionPropensity score matching
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