Sample

The National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) is a nationally representative longitudinal cohort study of Medicare beneficiaries 65 years and older, designed to assess late-life disability and functioning trends through annual in-home interviews (National Health and Aging Trends Study 2022). NHATS enrolled their initial cohort in 2011 (round 1), and a new sample of beneficiaries was replenished in 2015 (round 5) to provide a refreshed national representation (Freedman & Kasper, 2019). In 2020, the round 10 interview was conducted by telephone due to the pandemic. Between the end of June 2020 to January 2021, NHATS participants who completed the Round 10 interview received a COVID-19 supplementary survey about their experiences. Adult family members and friends who helped NHATS participants were invited to complete a COVID-19 Family and Friends survey about their experiences helping the NHATS participant during the outbreak.

This study employed data from the NHATS COVID-19 survey (N = 3257), combined with some information (e.g., Internet use, income) from the three most recent rounds of the NHATS main surveys (2018–2020), sensitive demographic files, and COVID-19 Family and Friends survey (See Supplementary Table S1 for more information). Because NHATS last recruited a cohort of Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 years and older in 2015, the data for this study comes from Medicare beneficiaries who were 70 years and older in 2020. Of 3257 NHATS respondents who completed the COVID-19 survey, 106 respondents (3.2%) were missing information on key demographic, health, and technology use variables. For the first three research questions, we handled missing data by assigning zero weights to those with missing information. For example, those participants with missing information (or the response is marked as refused or don’t know) in their 2018 or 2019 Internet use variables were dropped from the analytic sample. Therefore, the final analytic sample size for the first three research questions was 3151 NHATS respondents with complete data.

Of 3257 NHATS COVID-19 respondents, 44% (n = 1458) had a family member or friend complete the COVID-19 Family and Friends survey on their role during the pandemic. We conducted unweighted analyses on this subsample of 1458 NHATS respondents to assess the moderating role of technology support.