ONGOING RESEARCH
Supporting Digital Life
Emotional work, care and autonomy in family technology support
Explores the often-invisible emotional work involved when family members and trusted supporters help older adults navigate digital life, and how that support can build confidence or create dependence and frustration.
Research lead:
Marleen Campbell Lopez
Research Lead:
Key takeaway
Digital inclusion depends on relationships and ongoing support, not just access and digital skills.
Everyday technology help involves patience, reassurance, negotiation and emotional work.
Better support models could strengthen digital confidence while protecting older adults' autonomy.
Impact in practice
The findings could inform digital-literacy programs, aged-care services, community organisations and service design by identifying support approaches that strengthen confidence, protect autonomy and better recognise informal supporters.
About the research
Digital inclusion depends on more than access and individual digital skills. As more of everyday life moves online, older adults often turn to family members and other trusted people for help with technology. But helping someone navigate digital life involves much more than solving technical problems.
Supporting Digital Life explores the often-unseen emotional work involved in family technology support. It examines how older adults and their supporters manage frustration, anxiety and uncertainty; provide reassurance and encouragement; negotiate when to help and when to step back; and balance support with the older person's autonomy.
The project looks at digital support as an ongoing relationship of care, rather than simply a transfer of technological knowledge.
Why it matters
Access to healthcare, banking, government services, communication and social relationships increasingly depends on digital technologies. For many older adults, staying digitally connected is therefore important for autonomy, social inclusion and participation in everyday life.
Yet digital participation is rarely sustained through individual skills alone. Family members, friends and other trusted supporters often provide recurring assistance when problems arise.
These encounters can involve significant emotional work. Supporters may need to remain patient, repeat explanations, provide reassurance or decide whether to intervene. Older adults may experience frustration, anxiety or concerns about dependence and loss of autonomy. How these emotions are managed can influence whether support builds confidence and continued engagement or instead creates tension, dependence or withdrawal.
Understanding this emotional and relational dimension of digital support can help us develop better ways of supporting older adults, and the family members and others who help them, in an increasingly digital society.
Research focus
The project asks "How does emotional work within family and informal technology support shape older adults' ability to sustain their digital lives?"
In particular, the research explores:
Emotional work: how older adults and supporters manage frustration, anxiety, uncertainty, patience and reassurance.
Care and support: how helping with technology becomes part of broader relationships of care.
Autonomy and dependence: how people negotiate when to assist, teach, encourage independent effort, step back or take over.
Roles and responsibilities: how family relationships, technical competence and caring responsibilities shape who is expected to help and how.
Relationships over time: how repeated experiences of giving and receiving digital support can strengthen, strain or change relationships.
Sustaining digital life: how these interactions ultimately enable or constrain older adults' continued engagement with digital technologies.
How the research is being conducted
Supporting Digital Life uses a qualitative dyadic approach, examining both sides of the support relationship: older adults and the people who regularly help them with technology.
Rather than focusing on a single moment of assistance, the research examines recurring digital support encounters. It explores what happens when digital difficulties arise, how both people respond, what emotional work is required, and how decisions about helping, teaching, stepping back or taking over are negotiated.
Looking at the experience from both sides allows the research to uncover the often-invisible work involved in maintaining digital participation: the patience, reassurance, negotiation, care and emotional management that sit behind everyday technology support.
Meet the Researcher
Marleen Campbell Lopez
Marleen Campbell López is a PhD researcher in Marketing at RMIT University. Marleen's research focuses on digital inclusion, ageing and family consumption, with a particular interest in the emotional and relational dimensions of digital support. Her doctoral research seeks to understand how everyday relationships of care can enable, or sometimes constrain, older adults' continued participation in an increasingly digital world.
Who the research is for
The research involves older adults and the family members, friends or other trusted people who regularly support them with digital technologies.
By bringing together the perspectives of both the person receiving support and the person providing it, the project can explore how digital support is experienced and negotiated as a relationship.
Potential impact
The project aims to change how we think about digital inclusion in later life.
Rather than treating digital exclusion primarily as a problem of access or individual skills, Supporting Digital Life highlights the relationships and emotional work that often make continued digital participation possible.
The findings can inform digital-literacy programs, community organisations, aged-care services and service designers by identifying ways of providing support that protect autonomy, strengthen confidence, reduce frustration and recognise the contribution of family members and other informal supporters.
Ultimately, the project seeks to make the invisible work of supporting older people's digital lives more visible, and to identify how that work can better support care, autonomy and meaningful digital participation in later life.