Study On The Information Needs And Service Guarantee Of Urban Senior Citizens

In 2013, the number of China's senior citizen has reached a staggering point of 202.43 million. And it will maintain its current increasing trend over the next twenty years. All of China's two hundred million more senior citizens want to share the fruits of social development. However, many real environments such as industrialization, informationization, urbanization, modernization of agriculture and the co-existence of different economic and social forms have led to the problem of "Information Gap", which hindering the efficient use of social resources and services. To narrow the information gap between the senior citizens and the society and effectively meet the senior citizens' life and development needs, we have to have a clear picture of senior citizens' information needs and service status quo. Therefore, this paper is targeted at the urban senior citizens and in the following chapters we will look into their information needs and service guarantee.This paper falls into seven chapters:The first chapter is mainly about the introduction of the research background of the subject covered. In the meantime, it points out this paper's researching significance and clearly locates the research subject and defines some relevant concept. After the analysis and evaluation of the current research actuality, it introduces the research questions, research ideas, research methods and the originality of this paper.The Second chapter elaborates on the relevant theoretical basis of urban senior citizen's information needs and information service. In addition, it analyses relevant gerontology theories such as Social Constructivism, Social Support and Isolation, Life in the Round and so on. And theoretical support from theories such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs theory on the research of urban senior citizen's information needs. Last but not the least, the influence of Cultivation Theory, Spiral of Silence Theory and Information Poverty and other information utility theory's theoretical guidance on the research of senior citizen's utility of information service and thus leads to the induction of theoretical thinking of researches on senior citizen's information needs and information service.The third chapter reveals the status of senior citizens'information needs through small-scale personal interviews and a mass survey using questionnaires. Through the analysis of specific contents, features, factors of information needs of senior citizens and the diversified ways to meet senior citizens'information needs at different levels, this chapter laid a solid foundation for subsequent research on information services.Based on literature research and field research methods of observation, chapter four explores the current situation of information services for the elderly from the following five aspects respectively: the radio and television service information dissemination services, document information service, network information services, elderly information service organizations and other relevant bodies. For Television and radio information dissemination, although the elderly people are loyal audiences of television and radio programs, there is a gap between the information needs of the elderly and those programs. For the document information service, the free information services the public libraries provided are quite outdated and books in the libraries are not updated in time and are difficult for people to get access to. Besides, the major party newspapers and urban newspapers have little coverage on the elderly people. In addition, Some professional newspapers are in difficulties due to their monotonous content and poor management. For the network information services, the contents of government-sponsored portal sites for the elderly enjoyed high reliability. However, those non-governmental websites' content and quality are varied. Commission on Aging Office and universities of the third age are service institutions specialized for the elderly, the former mainly collects information and documents of the elderly group and relay them to the relevant departments in the form of proposals on the elderly work; the latter mainly involves providing knowledge transfer and information exchange sites for the elderly; home care information service center provides services for the elderly such as ordering, housekeeping, property maintenance and other information intermediary services. The community's role, compared to other service providers, is mainly involves information collection and information dissemination. Public welfare projects that are initiated by third party organizations provide medical, psychological health, the use of information tools and other information services for the elderly.Based on the research of information needs and information service for the urban senior citizens, the fifth chapter has put forward the view that we should attach more importance to the organization of information resources that are targeted at senior citizens. Besides, the objectives and principles of information resources organization were introduced, and the focal points for the organization of information resources have been elaborated form the special database construction, carrying out customized information resource organization and strengthening network information service.Combining the theory analysis and the results of researches in the preceding chapters' the sixth chapter constructs the information service support system for China's urban senior citizens. The information service support system includes the construction of information service system and information service security mechanism. the service guarantee mechanism is the structure and operation principle of the service system. The construction of the information service system includes the information infrastructure construction and information service body construction; the urban senior citizen information service guarantee mechanism consists of the government mechanism, market mechanism and group mechanism.The seventh chapter is the summarization and conclusion of the research content, which includes the conclusions and contributions of this research, as well as the limitations of the study and directions for future research.