support@essaywritingexpert.orgElderly Internet users report multiple benefits of using personal computers, including, but not limited to, the convenience of accessing health and other information; increased communication and social connections with family, friends, and others regardless of geographical distance; and staying informed of news and other happenings in their immediate and global communities. Internet technology and web-based resources can also promote homebound older adults’ physical and mental health of homebound older adults and reduce their social isolation and dependence on informal and formal support systems. However, few elderly people are computer-literate, with many inheriting computers from their children and being left on their own to learn how to use them effectively.
The CLIC community engagement project annually offers free computer literacy courses to the elderly in Florida computer labs. We will investigate one of these groups in our research.
The title of your project will be:
Bridging the elderly digital divide: An assessment of the impact of a computer literacy training course.
The main research question is as follows:
What impact does a computer literacy training course have on elderly attendees?
To answer the main research question, the following sub-research questions are in place:
1. What computer skills did the elderly attendees possess before the computer literacy training course?
2. To what extent did the computer literacy training course improve the computer skills of the elderly attendees?
3. What impact does a computer literacy training course have on elderly attendees’ sources of information, social contact, mental agility/stimulation, and empowerment/independence?
These three sub-research questions cannot be changed. You will use them exactly as they are presented here.
Important: We are not interested in evaluating the computer literacy course itself (what was good about the course, what was terrible, what else you would have liked to learn, etc.). We are interested in how useful the course was for the attendees. The questionnaires that we will use focus on the research questions.
The steps are as follows:
1. For now, you will conduct a literature review on the need for and the impact of computer literacy (courses) in general populations (younger age groups) and on the elderly specifically. For now (Introduction, Chapter 1), you will provide a general (short) overview of the topic ‘setting the scene’. In future (Literature Review, Chapter 2), you will present further research to support your general overview. in future will, therefore, be more in-depth.
2. In both, you will cover the following (exact) topics:
a. A general population review, which will focus on the benefits of computer literacy courses – whatever those benefits are.
b. An elderly population review, where the focus should be on the benefits gained in the four areas of interest listed in sub-research question 3 i.e., sources of information, social contact, mental agility/stimulation, and empowerment/independence, as well as any improvements in general computer skills.
3. An introduction chapter typically has the following structure:
Introduction and Project Overview (Chapter 1)
1.1 Introduction (that is, background literature in support of the problem statement)
1.2 Problem Statement and Research Questions
1.3 Overview of the methodological approach
1.4 Research contribution
1.5 Terms and Definitions
1.6 Project structure
The research problem should be clearly articulated and supported by the background literature.