Feyza Dalaylı

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of New Media and Communication at Anadolu University, Turkey. My research focuses on digital inequality, aging, and technology, with particular attention to older adults’ digital communication practices, social media use, social isolation, and the relationship between digital skills and well-being in later life. I am a member of the PAAR-net COST Action (CA22167) and conducted an extended research visit as a guest researcher at the University of Freiburg, Germany, during the grant period. 

Grant supported actions and initiatives:

This Virtual Mobility Grant supported a fully online, cross-disciplinary collaboration between Anadolu University (Turkey) and the University of Pannonia (Hungary), in partnership with Dr. Patrícia Szabó. The collaboration comprised four interconnected activities. First, we designed and administered a needs-assessment survey to 79 older adults (aged 51–70) in Eskişehir, Turkey, examining digital self-efficacy, barriers to ICT access, learning preferences, and social connectedness. The findings showed that privacy and security concerns (87.3%), fear of making mistakes (68.4%), and lack of knowledge (67.1%) are the main barriers to equitable digital access in this population, and that self-efficacy differs significantly by gender, age group, and education level. Second, based directly on these findings, three face-to-face educational modules were co-designed with Dr. Szabó: Module 1 – Digital Security and Privacy; Module 2 – e-Government and Health Appointments; Module 3 – Accessing Reliable Information Online. Third, the modules were piloted with 8 participants in Eskişehir, with post-session evaluation collected immediately after each session. The overall satisfaction mean was 4.91 out of 5; three items received perfect scores, and all eight participants reported reduced technology-related anxiety and expressed a wish to continue the program. Fourth, a joint peer-reviewed manuscript reporting the full study is currently in preparation, with initial submission planned to Universal Access in the Information Society (Springer, SCIE-indexed).

Testimonial:

This Virtual Mobility Grant gave me something I could not have built on my own: a genuine, equal partnership with a researcher from a different country and a different discipline. Working with Dr. Szabó meant every methodological decision—from the design of the questionnaire to the structure of the educational modules—was made through dialogue between communication science and human–computer interaction expertise. The result is a set of outputs that are richer, more rigorous, and more practically relevant than anything a single-discipline approach could have produced. What struck me most was the direct line between participants’ own voices and what we ultimately built: older adults told us they were afraid of making mistakes and worried about being scammed online, and those exact fears became the organizing principle of the first module. When all eight pilot participants reported feeling less anxious after the training, I felt this participatory approach was working exactly as PAAR-net envisages it—not research done on older adults, but research done with and for them. I am genuinely grateful to PAAR-net for making this collaboration possible, and I look forward to continuing it well beyond the grant period.