Understanding Communication Divide and Health Inequality: The Case of Aging Residents in Rural Areas of Taiwan

Abstract

With the advance of medical technology and life quality a coming aged society would be inevitable resulting in aging population accounts for the biggest proportion of a country’s healthcare cost Information and communication technology (ICT) has rapidly diffused worldwide in recent decades but not all groups have the opportunity to use ICT Mass media use still plays an important role in people’s daily life especially in aging people Also the propagation of mistakenly healthy information resulted in the possible illness of aging residents in rural areas The aim of this study is to understand communication divide and health inequality for aging people in the rural areas of Taiwan Communication divide is measured by the construct of information access literacy and application with computer Internet radio TV and newspaper and health inequality is measured by the construct of self-rated health status and healthcare services utilization Empirical data are collected via in-depth questionnaire survey from 470 aging people who age 60 years or older and live in rural areas ANOVA analysis is conducted to test for significant differences between means within different subgroups and regression analysis is conducted to explore the relationship between communication divide and health inequality The results are summarized as follow Aging residents in rural areas tend to spend more time on watching TV per day have the ability to search correct information on newspaper seek more frequently health information on TV and buy more frequently functional food on radio Digital divide exists across age and regions and health inequality exists across regions in Taiwan Besides mass media divide and health inequality become deepened along with the increase in age; digital divide and health inequality become worse along with the decrease in monthly disposable income; digital divide mass media divide and health inequality become worse along with the decrease in education level Further the more digital divide and the more mass media divide an aging people in rural areas has the more severe health inequality he suffers The impact of digital divide on health inequality is higher than that of mass media divide In the end some managerial implications are provided to bridge digital divide and mass media divide in rural areas and in turn relieve the status of health inequality

Date of Award	2014 Aug 7
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chun-Hsiung Liao (Supervisor)