Social Media Use and Senior Citizen’s Life Satisfaction

Social media is increasingly playing a pivotal role in people’s lives. This study explores how senior citizens use social media applications and the implications of this use on their overall satisfaction with life. First, a two-step Q-sorting method was used to develop rich measures of social media use experience and their relation to life domains. We identified 44 items in ten life domains from 24 focus group interviews in 20 Thai provinces. Next, we collected survey data from 341 senior citizens over 60 years old to evaluate the influence of satisfaction from social media use experiences on their domain life satisfaction and overall life satisfaction. The findings suggest that the top ten social media use activities fall into family, health, leisure, consumer, self, and friend domains. The PLS-SEM results show that social media use satisfaction shapes life satisfaction across ten domains. Path coefficients from five life domains have positive and significant effects on overall life satisfaction. These five salient domains are the community, consumer, family, health, and work domains