Support Networks in Public Digitalization
The purpose of the research is to answer these key questions: What is a digital support person? How do we help each other when we become confused in digital public self-service systems?
Based on the government’s latest digitalization strategy from May 2022, the project focuses on the concept of the digital support person. Through ethnological methods, the project examines the roles of being digitally supported and being digitally supportive.
The aim of the project is to qualitatively investigate how help and guidance with the public digital self-service systems in practice already transpire both between friends and family and through meetings with frontline staff in the public sector. In this context, the following issues are addressed: What is this responsibility and how is it distributed across various actors? Can we learn more about what citizens do when they have challenges with digital access to welfare services?
The target group of the project comprises citizens who have completed their working life and live in Vordingborg and Aarhus municipalities.
The results of the project will be disseminated in spring 2023. The primary dissemination will be in the form of a report as well as opinion pieces that aim to explain the everyday issues and structural challenges that may exist for both the digitally supported and the digitally supporting
The project has a two-part focus on the perspective of citizens and municipal frontline staff. What do citizens do when challenges arise with digital access to the welfare system? At the same time, how do frontline staff across the public sector experience the digital challenges of older citizens?
To answer these questions, an ethnographic approach is adopted in this project through in-depth interviews and observations of everyday life with public digitalization in the municipalities.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Phone | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Jespersen, Astrid Pernille | Professor |
Mortensen, Sofie Skovbæk
Funding
The sub-project Support Networks in Public Digitalization is part of the project From Working Life to Senior Life (FATS), which is supported by the Nordea Foundation.
PI: Astrid Pernille Jespersen
Project period: 2020-2023