About the SOCIAL project
SOCIAL – Social relations, digital technologies and wellbeing of older people is a three-year research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research through the Italian Fund for Science – FIS-2 Advanced Grant scheme. The project runs from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2028 and has a total budget of €2,068,275.
The project investigates how digitalisation is reshaping the social lives of older people, with a particular focus on inequalities in digital access, skills, confidence, and support. Rather than considering internet use as an individual behaviour only, SOCIAL examines how digital technologies are embedded in everyday relationships, care arrangements, support exchanges, and opportunities for participation in later life.
The project addresses three main research questions: who is included or excluded from digital participation in later life; how digital technologies affect social relations, family support, and access to services; and whether digital resources contribute to, or instead reinforce, inequalities in wellbeing among older adults. A key aim is to understand the conditions under which digital technologies become a resource for autonomy, social participation, and wellbeing, and when they may instead generate new forms of dependency or exclusion.
SOCIAL combines the analysis of existing national and cross-national datasets with the collection of new primary data in Italy. A central component of the project is a nationally representative face-to-face survey of older adults in Italy, designed to collect detailed information on social networks, family relations, digital technology use, digital skills and attitudes, support exchanges, access to services, and multiple dimensions of health and wellbeing. By integrating secondary data analysis with new survey evidence, the project will provide an empirically grounded assessment of how social and digital inequalities intersect in ageing societies.