Elderly Mental Health During COVID-19: The Role of Technology Use

This paper studies the mental health impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on older adults with a particular focus on the role of technology use. We use nationally representative individual-level survey data from a random sample of 3257 community-dwelling older Americans (65+) from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) COVID-19 supplement (2020). We empirically estimate the impact of COVID-19 (under three alternative specifications) on the five mental health outcomes while controlling other confounding factors. The mental health indicators include feelings of loneliness, anxiety, feeling sad or depressed, poor sleep quality, and not feeling hopeful about the future. The confounding control factors in our empirical model are age, gender, race, financial difficulty, physical health, area of residence, and living arrangement. We further examine whether the mental health effects differ between the technology users and the non-users of technology. Our findings indicate a lower likelihood of adverse health outcomes among technology users (compared to the non-users of technology) during the pandemic. These results validate the potential use of technology for healthcare delivery, mental health therapy, and other lifestyle interventions to improve the quality of life in the older population.