Relational Digital Agency: An Everyday Life Study of Mobile Communication in Nursing Homes

Abstract

The pervasive association of long-term care with frailty and dependency has shaped research agendas. Everyday life studies that take into account care home residents’ knowledge, values, and experiences are few and far between. This research engages care home residents in dialogue to co-produce understanding about their lived experiences with mobile technologies. Drawing on qualitative research with 39 care home residents at long-term care sites in Canada, the paper calls for reframing digital inequalities in terms of relational digital agency. The analysis describes how meaningful communication environments in long-term care involve a wide range of factors, including effective access to analogue media and wider support networks, which enable residents to put meaningful limits on their uses of mobile devices. Moreover, the findings show how having the opportunity to deny and contest mobile technologies can be an important part of feeling socially and digitally included, which brings question to existing measures of digital inclusion that focus on quantity and quality of technology use. Whereas most research on digital agency has concerned youth, this paper develops an understanding of relational digital agency to account for long-term care residents’ experiences negotiating and adapting to digital change.