One-third of senior Americans don’t use computers

Over the past two decades, seniors (adults with age above 60) have been catching up on their adoption of new technology, but about one-third of them still have never used a computer.

From my own previous encounters with senior people, I know some of them have never touched computers. But roughly what fraction of them? To answer this question, we can take a look at the data. The General Social Survey (GSS) asked 62,466 people,
“Do you personally ever use a computer at home, at work, or at some other location?”
And we have a total of 13,841 valid responses, who either answered yes or no, between 2000 and 2018.

To separate the seniors from the younger population, I categorize the respondents into four age groups : young adults (18-29), adults (30-44), old adults(45-59), and senior adults (60+). I choose the age ranges for these groups so that there are roughly the same number of respondents in each group. The trends from different age groups are illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Fractions of people saying “yes” by age group over the past two decades. Each dot represents the fraction of the respondents saying ‘yes’ each year for the age group of the corresponding color. The lines are drawn using linear regression, so each line best-fits the dots.

I have a few remarks from Figure 1:

• From 2000 to 2018, the fraction of seniors who use computers has increased by 40 percentage points. 7 out of 10 seniors use computers in 2018, which is a huge increase from 3 out 10 seniors using computers back in 2000.
• The gap between seniors and the younger groups (young adults, adults, and old adults) has also decreased from about 40 percentage points to 20 percentage points. This gap has been continuously narrowing over the past two decades.
• The adoption of computers by seniors has slowed down in recent few years. And three out of ten seniors still have never used a computer in 2018.

So what’s keeping one-third of our senior citizens away from computers?

I don’t have an answer, but I have some questions.

Do seniors not have adequate access to computers? Are they simply not interested in learning about computers? What factors contributed to the slow down of adoption rate in the recent few years? Did they instead adopt alternate forms of computers like smart phones, IPads, and Kindles?

In short, we’ve made constant progress towards onboarding seniors to the computer world. Nonetheless, I see an opportunity to further promote the use of computers for senior Americans.

This is a modified version of a notebook by Allen Downey, available here under the MIT License.

This modified version is also under the MIT License.