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Community and Communication in the Third Age: The Impact of Internet and Cell Phone Use on Attachment to Place in Later Life in England

Centre for Behavioural and Social Sciences in Medicine, University College London, England.

Address correspondence to Dr. Chris Gilleard, Centre for Behavioural and Social Sciences in Medicine, University College London, Charles Bell House, 67-73 Riding House Street, London W1W 7EJ, United Kingdom. E-mail: CGilleard{at}aol.com.

Abstract

Objectives. We investigated the following question: Would access to and use of domestic information and communication technology affect people's attachment to place in later life?

Methods. Drawing upon data on ownership of cell phones and use of Internet/e-mail from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, we measured the association between access to such technology and self-rated attachment to one's neighborhood.

Results. There was a significant negative association between attachment to place and ownership and use of domestic information and communication technology, particularly the Internet. This association remained after taking account of age/cohort differences, as well as the influence of gender, disability, socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, differences in income and educational status, and length of residence in the area.

Discussion. The results suggest that ownership and use of domestic information and communication technology reduces the sense of attachment to the local neighborhood among individuals 50 and older in England. It does not, however, influence the perceived sense of trust in or perceived friendliness of people in the neighborhood. We suggest that domestic information and communication technology may be more liberating of neighborhood boundedness than destructive of social capital.

There is a considerable literature on the nature and determinants of people's attachment to place and the corresponding relationship it has to the experience of community (Calhoun, 1980; Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2001). A number of social scientists have argued that, in contemporary society, social relationships have become fluid, with the attachment to place hollowed out, replaced by affinities with symbolic communities (Cohen, 1989; Savage, Bagnall, & Longhurst, 2005). Calhoun (1998) summarized this transformation in the experience of community as a shift from communities of propinquity to virtual communities that are only loosely connected with place.

Equally, scholars have argued that as people age, the area or neighborhood grows more important and attachment to place (in the sense of attachment to the neighborhood where one lives) becomes a central element in people's quality of life (Oswald, Hiever, Wahl, & Mollenkopf, 2005). A significant body of research has indicated that older people report feeling a greater attachment to their neighborhood compared with younger people (Sampson, 1988; Scharf, Phillipson, & Smith, 2003), irrespective of how long they have lived there (Coulthard, Walker, & Morgan, 2002). Agedness and rootedness (by which we mean a strong attachment to one's locale) seem interlinked, although not necessarily contingent, processes.

This raises the question of whether the greater attachment to place observed among older people represents a developmental, life-stage phenomenon (whereby a greater sense of rootedness arises from settling down, living longer, and feeling increasingly at home in the world) rather than a feeling bred from the familiarity of living in the same place for a long period (Hay, 1998). Alternatively, the greater attachment to place reported by older people may be a consequence of the limitations facing older people in choosing where or how to live, and their attachment to place may represent a way of adapting to the limited chances of living elsewhere that come with age (Oswald et al., 2005). If the former, one might expect the relationship between age or years of life and the sense of belonging to be unmediated by social circumstances. In contrast, if older people's attachment to place is primarily the result of their particular social circumstances, making the best of the limited opportunities that people in later life have to move out of their neighborhood, one might anticipate that those people least able to move away would express the strongest sense of belonging to their neighborhood.

This question of whether attachment to place is a life-stage phenomenon or a response structured by social circumstances has not been subject to theoretically informed empirical analysis. Any attempt to explore this question must take into account the distinction we made at the outset of this article, namely the contemporary shift from communities of propinquity to symbolic or virtual communities. Gilleard and Higgs (2005, pp. 147–148) argued that communities of propinquity have declined in importance and that symbolic or virtual communities have increased in importance for both old and young. Sources of personal identity and belongingness derive less from the locality in which people live and increasingly from access to virtual or symbolic communities beyond the immediate neighborhood. This transition has been achieved partly through technological change (the telephone, television, cell phones, e-mail, and the Internet) and partly through cultural and economic changes that have led to a greater spatial dispersion of kin, increased travel, more vacations abroad and at home, as well as the steady decline in local industries and the community of work.

As a result, Gilleard and Higgs argued, the role of the local neighborhood in shaping people's sense of identity has declined. People can easily contact family and friends without their having to live close by, and order goods and services over the phone (and now online). With expanded car ownership and improved public transportation, visits to shopping centers and out-of-town retail parks are relatively routine experiences for most householders. Virtual communities—in the form of TV soap operas—provide much of the same vicarious interest that the gossip from local neighborhoods once did. The importance of local shops, local pubs, the local church or chapel, and the local post office has declined. Neighbors are less likely to be kin.

The decline in the centrality of the local neighborhood and the rise of geographically dispersed social networks is likely to impact upon people in different ways depending on their age and lifestyle. Beginning in the late 18th century, there has been a secular increase in residential mobility in Britain that accelerated in the post-war decades of the 20th century (Pooley & Turnbull, 1998). Younger birth cohorts have experienced greater residential mobility than older cohorts, just as more members of these younger cohorts have been exposed to the dispersal of kin and the dislocation of home and work, as well as travelling more, eating out more often, and taking more vacations abroad (Blow, Leicester, & Oldfield, 2004; Gilleard & Higgs, 2005). Consequently, older age groups may not have experienced quite the same detachment from place either because of their age, their historical location in the 20th century, or some combination of the two. As a result, the majority of older people may not have been exposed to the various means of sustaining social networks at a distance that younger adults have been exposed to, nor may they have acquired the kinds of links to the virtual communities that working-age adults experience, in particular the opportunities arising from the Internet, e-mail, and other forms of personal networking (Wellman, 2001).

The present article focuses upon the role of new home-based information and communication technology (ICT) in the United Kingdom that facilitates access to social networks beyond those of the locality, potentially altering the boundedness of place in later life. In particular, we wished to test the hypothesis that access to and use of domestic ICT (cell phones and the Internet) would influence older people's sense of attachment to their local neighborhood, attenuating the developmental role that age seems to play in securing attachment to place.

Cell phones and Internet-connected personal computers (PCs) help people keep in touch with friends and family irrespective of their physical proximity and, once a person is familiar with the technology, with relatively little effort. Unlike public or private transportation, their use does not require much in the way of physical mobility. Compared with the standard telephone, the cell phone can be readily used inside and outside the home, enabling people to either speak or send messages as and when they choose. In the case of the Internet, e-mail lets people send friends and family much more than written messages (e.g., one can attach photographs, music, jokes, or even video films with personalized commentaries). This can take place instantly across continents, using the same time frame in which face-to-face communication occurs.

The attractiveness of the new ICT is indicated by its rapid adoption. In 1990, less than one fifth of British households owned a PC, cell phones were marketed almost exclusively to business people (Agar, 2004, p. 83), and the World Wide Web had not yet been launched. In 1995, 27% of households had a PC, 16% a cell phone, and 5% had acquired Internet access. By 2004, 61% of British households had a PC, 79% a cell phone, and 51% access to the Internet (National Statistics, 2005a, 2005b). However, the adoption of the new technology has not been distributed evenly across households. Whereas 91% of two-person working-age households have a cell phone, 73% of two-person retirement-age households have one. Similarly, 68% of two-person working-age households have Internet access at home, but only 36% of two-person retirement-age households do. Large family households are more than 5 times as likely to have Internet access (68%) as single householders of retirement age (12%). Experts have also observed such differential rates of adoption of domestic ICT in the United States (Charness & Czaja, 2005, p. 664).

Given the variability of cell phone and home computer ownership among the older population, we wanted to see whether there was any direct correspondence between feelings of attachment to place among older people and their access to these household forms of ICT. In order to test this proposition, we used data drawn from the initial wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing gathered in 2002 (ELSA; Marmot, Banks, Blundell, Lessof, & Nazroo, 2003). This study is a nationally representative study of 12,100 people aged 50 and older living in private households in England (see Taylor, Conway, Calderwood, & Lessof, 2003, for full details of the sampling methodology) and provides information on a wide range of demographic, financial, personal, and health variables, including the two key variables of concern to the present study, namely ownership of cell phones and PCs and use of the Internet.

METHODS

Participants
Study organizers drew the ELSA sample from people who had taken part in one or another of three previous national health surveys for England, conducted in 1998, 1999, and 2001. The interviews took place from March 2002 until March 2003. Of the 12,100 people from whom information was gathered, 11,234 were aged 50 or older (6,123 women and 5,111 men). In all, 18% of the men lived alone, whereas 31% of the women did so. In addition, 75% of the men in the sample were married, whereas 55% of the women were; 12% of the women had no children, and 14% of the men had none. Finally, 37% of the men had finished school without any formal qualifications, and 15% had a college degree or equivalent; 50% of the women had no educational qualifications, and 7% had a college degree or greater. (In England, members of these cohorts could leave formal education [High School] at the age of 14 for the older cohorts [i.e., those older than 70, born in the first two decades of the 20th century] or 15 for the younger cohorts [i.e., those in their 50s and 60s born in the 1930s and 1940s] without any certification or diploma.)

Procedure and Measures
The main study involved an extensive set of questionnaires, tests, and interview questions covering information on health, income and wealth, family circumstances, current and/or previous occupation, social activity, physical and cognitive function, as well as details of the individual's physical and social environment (see Taylor et al., 2003, for full methodological details). Researchers gathered the information using personal face-to-face interviews and self-completed questionnaires. For the purposes of the present study, we conducted all analyses using basic demographic data of age, education, gender, length of current residence, and disability status, as well as information about the socioeconomic status of the informant's neighborhood (area), six-point ratings of attachment to the neighborhood (area), perceived friendliness of people in the area, and perceived trust in people in the area (items from the self-reported social capital questionnaire used in the ELSA survey; Stafford et al., 2003). We also examined data on frequency of contacts with family, friends, and children, and finally data on the ownership and use of domestic ICT (ownership of cell phones and home PC and use of Internet/e-mail).

For our main analyses, we categorized the variables as follows. We organized age into decade groups (i.e., 50–59, 60–69, 70–79, and 80–89 years). We trichotomized length of residence into length of residence in the current home (less than 5 years, 5–25 years, and 26 or more years) and also into the proportion of the adult life spent in the current home (less than 25%, 25–50%, and more than 50%; we considered age 18 and beyond to be adulthood). We trichotomized educational status into respondents who had left school without any formal qualifications, those who had left high school with some formal qualifications, and finally those who had obtained a college degree or equivalent.

We used information on activity of daily living (ADL) function to divide the sample into persons with no ADL limitations, those who reported having one or two ADL problems, and those who reported having at least three ADL limitations. We used responses to questions on the ownership of household goods (cell phone, PC) to divide the sample into respondents who owned a cell phone and those who did not, those who owned a PC and those who did not, and those who used Internet/e-mail and those who did not. We derived the objective ratings of the socioeconomic status of the local area/neighborhood from the Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) score associated with each household's postal code (Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 2001). The IMD score is a composite measure of neighborhood socioeconomic disadvantage based on average household income, average levels of employment, number of people with a disability, housing quality, educational achievement, and access to services (see Janevic, Gjona, & Hyde, 2003). Data on IMD scores for the areas where respondents lived were available for 11,024 of the respondents. We divided IMD scores into quintiles, representing areas that were definitely above average, above average, average, below average, and well below average in level of socioeconomic deprivation. Finally, we based individual variation in income status upon equivalized household income quintiles.

Complete responses to the questions assessing respondents' views about their area were available for 9,863 of the respondents. The distribution of responses to these items were all highly skewed, so we dichotomized responses into those people who scored 1 or 2 (i.e., reporting they did really "feel part of the neighborhood," "feel most people in the area are friendly," and feel "most people in the area can be trusted") versus those who were neutral or did not feel such attachment, friendliness, or trust.

On the assumption that ownership and use of domestic ICT would be negatively associated with attachment to place, we used multivariate logistic regression analysis to test for the robustness of this relationship. We included potential confounding factors such as age/cohort, length of residence, educational background, health status, and socioeconomic status of the neighborhood in the analyses to test for the existence of a statistically independent relationship between reduced attachment to place and the use of domestic ICT. We sought to determine whether any observed association was specific to the attachment to place or whether it was part of a more generalized favorable view of the neighborhood by conducting similar logistic regression analyses with responses to the other questions on trust and friendliness as the dependent variables. We conducted all statistical analyses using SPSS Version 14.0.

RESULTS

Prevalence of Internet and Cell Phone Use According to the Main Demographic Features of the ELSA Sample
Internet use and the ownership of cell phones varied systematically with the circumstances of the individual. Ownership/access fell steeply and consistently by age group and less steeply but equally consistently by degree of neighborhood deprivation. There was a similar trend evident between ownership of cell phones, use of the Internet, and length of residence. Persons born earlier in the 20th century and those living in more disadvantaged areas were measurably less likely to either own a cell phone or use the Internet (see Figures 1 and 2). Those who used the Internet and owned a cell phone had lived in their current home 5 years less than those who had neither (18.7 years vs 24.1 years), F(2, 10,876) = 110.6, p <.001. There were also gender effects. Nearly 60% of the men in the sample (n = 2,783 of 4,675) and 57% of the women (n = 3,141 of 5,600) owned cell phones; this difference was statistically significant, ²(1, N = 10,275) = 11.68, p <.001. More than one third of the men (n = 1,666 of 4,675; 35.6%) and more than one quarter of the women (n = 1,464 of 5,600; 26.1%) used the Internet and/or e-mail; this difference was highly significant, ²(1, N = 10,275) = 108.0, p <.001.

View larger version (23K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Use of cell phones and Internet/e-mail by age group (n = 10,052)

View larger version (45K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 2. Use of cell phones and Internet/e-mail by level of neighborhood area deprivation (n = 9,918)

Attachment to Place According to the Main Demographic Features of the ELSA Sample
Attachment to place also varied systematically with the circumstances of the individual. It was consistently higher in the two older (75% and 72%) than in the two younger (59% and 67%) cohorts, ²(3, N = 10,168) = 187.80, p <.0001. The relationship between attachment and degree of neighborhood deprivation was less consistent. Respondents living in "average" neighborhoods reported the greatest attachment (68%) compared with those living in either the most (64%) or the least (65%) deprived neighborhoods, ²(4, N = 10,750) = 12.47, p <.05. There was a significant association between attachment to place and length of residence, with 73% of respondents who had lived more than 25 years in their current home reporting a strong attachment to place, compared with 64% for those who had lived more than 5 but less than 26 years and 57% for those who had lived 5 years or less in their current home, ²(2, N = 10,707) = 149.41, p <.0001. These effects were still evident when proportion of adult life spent in current home was used instead of the absolute number of years in current home. Strong attachment was reported by 60% of those who had lived less than 25% of their adult life in their current home, by 65% of those who had lived between 25% and 50% of their adult life in their current home, and by 70% of those who had lived more than half of their adult life in their current home, ²(2, N = 10,707) = 75.56, p <.0001.

There were significant gender effects. Whereas 68% of the women in the sample (n = 3,708 of 5,459) reported feeling strongly attached to their neighborhood, 63% of the men (n = 2,931 of 4,604) did so, ²(1, N = 10,063) = 20.22, p <.001. Educational status also affected attachment to place, with better educated participants reporting less attachment to their local neighborhood than those with the least education. In all, 60% of persons with college-level education (n = 1,767 of 2,938) reported a strong attachment to their neighborhood compared with 65% of those with high school qualifications (n = 1,397 of 2,375) and 71% (n = 2,862 of 4,045) of those who had left school with no qualifications, ²(2, N = 9,358 ) = 88.08, p <.001. There was, however, no association between functional status and attachment to the neighborhood, with 66% of persons with no ADL limitations (n = 2,883 of 4,350) reporting a strong attachment to their neighborhood and an identical proportion with three or more ADL impairments doing so, ²(2, N = 10, 271) = 0.38, ns. In short, younger, better educated men who had lived a short time in their current home were least likely to report a strong attachment to their neighborhood, and, reason would suggest, were least likely to feel bound by it.

Attachment to Place, Internet Access, and Use of Cell Phones
Given the many common demographic influences on attachment to place and on Internet access and cell phone ownership, did access to domestic ICT independently influence attachment to place? In order to address this central question in our research, we carried out a series of multivariate logistic regression analyses, treating attachment to place as the principle dependent variable, and age/cohort, length of current residence, gender, educational attainment, ADL status, neighborhood deprivation, ownership of a cell phone, and use of the Internet/e-mail as independent categorical predictor variables. We conducted two further analyses substituting attachment to place with first trust in people in the local area and then perceived friendliness as alternative dependent variables.

As Table 1 indicates, although age/cohort, education, gender, disability status, and length of residence all influenced attachment to place, independently of one another, Internet use was still negatively associated with attachment to place after we had taken all these variables into account. This effect was specific to reports of attachment to place. Although there was a trend for use of the Internet to be associated with lower rates of perceived trust and neighborhood friendliness, this effect was not statistically significant.

We designed our final analysis to see if the apparent shift from communities of propinquity to virtual or symbolic communities was mediated by more frequent communication with distant family and friends. In ELSA, several questions asked the respondents about the frequency and satisfactoriness of their contacts with family, friends, and children, including the frequency of direct (face-to-face) contacts and of indirect contacts (via the mail, by telephone, and/or by e-mail). Although it was not possible to distinguish between responses indicating communications via postal or electronic mail due to the inclusive nature of the questions asked, it was possible to calculate an overall index of the frequency of all non-face-to-face contacts with family, friends, and children (based upon summing responses to all six questions, with each response ranging from 1 = yearly or less often phone/mail contact with children/other family/friends through 6 = more than once per week phone/mail contact with children/other family/friends).

There was a positive association between the frequency of non-face-to-face contacts with family and friends and the sum of cell phone ownership and/or Internet/e-mail use (r =.327, df = 5,129, p <.0001) and between the sum of ownership of a PC and use of the Internet (r =.333, df = 5,129, p <.0001). However, the frequency of indirect contacts with family, friends, and children was positively, though hardly significantly, associated with a stronger attachment to place (r =.045, df = 5,129, p <.01), providing no support for the hypothesis that the weaker attachment to place associated with ICT use was the result of increased indirect contacts with family, friends, and children living outside the neighborhood. Partialling out the frequency of indirect contacts did not attenuate the negative association between PC ownership and Internet use and attachment to place (r_12.3 = –.137, df = 5,129, p <.0001 vs r₁₂ = –.137, df = 5,129, p <.0001).

DISCUSSION

The results of our study indicate a systematic independent association between ownership and use of home-based ICT and a weakened attachment to place in later life, as reflected in the experience of the participants of the ELSA. This was the case both for persons from the younger generation (i.e., those in their 50s and 60s born in the 1930s and 1940s) and for those from the older generation (i.e., those older than 70, born in the first two decades of the 20th century) and was evident among those living in well-off areas as well as those living in poorer areas. A number of demographic variables were associated both with Internet use and ownership of cell phones and a weak attachment to place. Nevertheless, logistic regression analyses demonstrated that such demographic factors do not explain the association noted between ownership and use of home-based ICT and a weakened attachment to place.

Our study found, as others have done, that increasing age is associated with greater attachment to place (Sampson, 1988; Scharf et al., 2003). But rather than assume that this reflects a developmental process of increasing rootedness that arises from living longer, we have shown that systematic structural differences among people in later life mediate this attachment. These differences arise, we suggest, because they represent reduced opportunities among people born earlier in the 20th century to make contact with a wider community and establish personal networks beyond the boundaries of the communities of propinquity. Their opportunity to move is as limited as is their opportunity to communicate with a wider network. The importance of home-based ICT is that it may help offset such neighborhood boundedness, and thereby allow people in later life to sustain links with others beyond the local neighborhood.

At the same time age cohort remained a significant factor affecting attachment to place, after we had taken into consideration other structural factors such as education, disability, gender, the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, as well as access to domestic ICT and length of residence. This might indicate that part of the increased sense of attachment to one's place in the world is indeed a feature of life-span development and not simply an adaptive strategy in response to limited opportunities for an alternative place to live and an alternative lifestyle. The fact that disability status was not associated with attachment to place suggests that it may not be the physical limitations associated with aging that explains these age cohort effects. The question remains open, however, of whether this represents an age/stage-of-life effect or the differing experience of community by older compared with younger cohorts.

We also cannot determine from this study the factors that motivate people aged 50 and over to obtain a cell phone or purchase an Internet-connected home PC, nor can we trace the social–psychological route whereby domestic ICT attenuates people's attachment to place. Although it is clear that ICT ownership and use are associated with higher levels of non-face-to-face communication with family and friends, it does not seem as if the frequency or extent of such virtual contacts directly influence the attachment to place in later life. It seems unlikely that the reduced attachment to place associated with ownership of and access to domestic ICT arises from older people having a wider social network outside their own neighborhood. The use of Internet-linked PCs may be causally related to people having more extensive links with a wider network of family and friends outside their neighborhood, but it seems that it is the access to the technology itself rather than the extent of non-face-to-face contacts that alleviates the experience of attachment or boundedness to the communities of propinquity. The fact that, irrespective of Internet use, ownership of a PC was itself associated with a weaker attachment to place suggests that having a home computer means more than having one's own e-mail system.

Finally, it is important to note that the impact of domestic ICT does not seem to undermine other positive experiences of the neighborhood, such as having trust in local people or perceiving local people as friendly. People who reported being satisfied with their neighborhood did not automatically report a strong attachment to it (Ringel & Finkelstein, 1991). If, as seems the case, communities of propinquity are becoming less salient to people's lives, partly as a result of the expanding technologies of virtual communication, the consequences may not be so dire as some have predicted.

Footnotes

Decision Editor: Kenneth F. Ferraro, PhD

Received for publication April 4, 2006. Accepted for publication March 3, 2007.

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