Effectiveness of our platform
Our social media pages have succeeded in raising the awareness of young adults in their parents' retirement.
From mid March to May 7, our Instagram page has:
Been engaged by 740 accounts
Gained 502 followers (with 79% of them in the age of 18-34)
Created 27 posts of memes and Q&As regarding retirement
...and our top post has gained 97 likes
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However,
we also need to find out how effective our platform in enabling the young adults we have reached to support and help their parents' transitions to and life during retirement.
User Experience questionnaire
A questionnaire was created to collect the user experience of our platform, and it was delivered using a google form distributed through our Instagram stories and account descriptions.
With regards to the objectives we have established for the platform, our questionnaire consists of 5 sections, with each section containing statements that participants rate whether they agree or disagree with them using the Likert scale of 1-5, while 5 means very satisfying and 1 is very dissatisfying.
The 5 sections are:
Knowledge gained from the platform (6 statements)
Attitudes regarding the information presented in the platform (5 statements)
Effectiveness of the platform towards the participants (7 statements)
Effectiveness of the platform towards the participants’ parents (6 statements)
Attitudes towards how information is delivered in the platform (6 statements)
In addition, basic demographics of the participants’ age, sex, education level, martial status, types of housing and median household income were collected at the end of the questionnaire.
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The questionnaire and its components (in Chinese) can be found here.
The mean score of our 30 statement questions is 3.96 over 5, which means the participants agree with our statements and shows a positive attitude towards our platform.
For section 1 - Knowledge gained from the platform, the mean score is 4.00 out of 5, standard deviation is 0.455 which is a small number that shows our data is significant. This means that participants think that our content is relevant to our purpose: they learnt psychological knowledge about retirement life and knew more about the potential problems of retirement life. However, it seems that we can do better in helping our users with getting access to more relative organizations about retirement life.
For section 2 - Attitudes regarding the information presented in the platform, mean score is 4.03 and standard deviation is 0.312 which also show high significance of our data. This means that participants agree that the information we shared is relevant to their lives and neither too deep nor shallow.
For section 3 - Effectiveness of the platform towards the participants, mean score is 3.99 and standard deviation is 0.322 which also show high significance of our data. This shows that participants agree that we helped with psychological issues, like how to adapt the role change of their parents. But there are still room for improvement: we should provide more appropriate activities choice for retirees and more solid solutions for communication problems.
For section 4 - Effectiveness of the platform towards the participants’ parents, mean score is 3.73 and standard deviation is 0.640 which show that our data is a little bit insignificant. The reason might be the sample size is not large enough: only half of the participants answered this section while some of them did not complete it. As it requires the participants’ parents to answer and it may prove inconvenient for the participants to do so, answering this section is not mandatory and participants may choose to skip this section of questions.
Nevertheless, the score shows that participants agree that we helped with the real life of the parents. However, the score is not as satisfied as the entire parts: we should provide more appropriate activities choice for retirees and more solid solutions for communication problems.
For section 5 - Attitudes towards how information is delivered in the platform, mean score is 4.05 and standard deviation is 0.478 which show high significance of our data. This shows that participants agree that the designs of our posts are well arranged and the length of the posts is moderate.
The overall performance is quite satisfying, but we have to focus on making the contents further more practical and match the needs of the users.
Regarding the demographics of our participants, about 60% of the participants ages 18-25, while 30% are in the ages 26-33, which shows that we reached the young adults that we have aimed to address.
Regarding the education level of our participants, 85% of our participants are educated university level or higher; 70% of them are living in private building or HOS; 90% of them have median household income higher then 20000. It shows that our participants are relatively well educated and have a relatively good living condition. This may be one of the bias: their education level and living condition may make them do not need some of our information, for example, how to solve a conflicts emerging from parent-children relationships. People that are well educated or living well have higher chance being able to control their emotion, and thus able to avoid or solve the problem on their own.
Despite these potential biases of our participants, it is also clear that our platform have raised awareness of retirement among young adults and potentially their pre-retiring and retiring parents, and have enabled these young adults to support and help their parents' transitions and life towards retirement.
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