Welfare states increasingly deliver public services 'digital by default', presupposing an idealised self-serving digital citizen who can authenticate electronically, read the majority language, and complete transactions without staff help. A qualitative study of Russian-speaking older migrants in Finland (Safarov, 2021, Technology in Society 66:101627) found that this ideal clashes with older migrants' real capacities, producing stress, anxiety, and risk of exclusion from rights and benefits; it called for more research into migrants' channel choice practices and drew attention to the asymmetry between the self-serving digital citizen ideal and actual user capacities and its consequences. The task is to determine how local language skills, knowledge of public services, and other contextual factors shape older migrants' choices between digital and traditional service channels beyond that single case; through what mechanisms the asymmetry between the self-serving digital citizen ideal and actual user capacities affects equity in access to rights and benefits; and which service design features mitigate the resulting stress, anxiety, and exclusion.

Background

Across Europe and beyond, welfare administrations have moved public services — health care, social benefits, permits, and other entitlements — online, often following a 'digital by default' policy in which the digital channel is the primary or presumed mode of delivery, with in-person and telephone service reduced or withdrawn. Digital self-service presupposes a model user who owns the required devices, holds electronic identification (e-ID, the credentials needed to log in to official services), reads the majority language, and can complete bureaucratic transactions without staff assistance. Research on the digital divide — the stratification of access to and benefit from information technology — distinguishes first-level divides in access, second-level divides in skills and use, and third-level divides in the outcomes people obtain from being online. Within this landscape, the concept of digital choice (Helsper, 2009) captures that non-use of the internet among older adults is not always a matter of inability: it can be an active decision shaped by habits, trust, and fears, even though structural constraints bound the real freedom of that choice. Channel choice research in electronic government studies which factors lead citizens to use digital versus traditional service channels (in-person visits, phone, mail) for the same public service; its classic determinants include demographic characteristics, perceived ease of use and usefulness, trust, and the characteristics of the channels themselves. A separate critical literature on the digital welfare state has documented that digitalised, self-service-based welfare provision creates new exclusionary mechanisms at the frontline for disadvantaged citizens (Schou and Pors, 2018, on Danish citizen service centres). Older migrants — people aged roughly 60+ who have migrated and settled in a new country — sit at the intersection of these vulnerabilities: they face the age-related digital divide together with majority-language limitations, limited knowledge of the destination country's welfare and public-service system, and the migration-specific disadvantage that essential services are delivered in a language and through institutional logics they have not grown up with. Culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) older adults are now a standard object of study in this space. The empirical trigger for the present problem is a qualitative case study of Russian-speaking older migrants in Finland (Safarov, 2021), based on participant observation, interviews, and diaries at digital support workshops. Finland is among the most digitalised welfare states, with strong electronic identification and heavily online public health and social services. The study developed the notion of digital choice to analyse participants' engagement with and disengagement from digital public services, showing that personal attributes (habits, trust, fears), objective determinants (language barriers, public-service knowledge, digital skills), and the government-driven digitalisation context jointly shaped adoption. Its central theoretical observation is an asymmetry: the normative construct of a self-serving digital citizen — the autonomous, self-sufficient user that digital-by-default administration implicitly addresses — conflicts with the actual capacities of many older migrants, and this contradiction, the paper argues, produces services that generate anxiety, stress, and exclusion. The paper's own policy discussion lists candidate remedies (simplicity, usability, reliability, multiple language options, plain-language forms, formal advisory services, and continued multichannel delivery), but presents them as implications of one qualitative case rather than evaluated design features. The study deliberately examined one migrant group (Russian-speakers) in one welfare system (Finland), recruited through voluntary digital support workshops, mostly highly educated and mostly female — limits the author himself flags. The open problem is therefore the research the paper explicitly calls for — an empirical account, beyond the single case, of migrants' channel choice practices — together with the directions its own findings suggest: how the self-service ideal/capacity asymmetry translates into unequal access to rights and benefits, and which service design features mitigate the stress, anxiety, and exclusion older migrants experience.

Problem Statement

The problem, as posed by Safarov (2021) and kept at its natural generality, is to produce an empirically grounded account of how digitalised public service delivery affects older migrants, with one overarching objective: to explain — and thereby enable the mitigation of — the inequity that arises when public services presume a self-serving digital citizen whose capacities many older migrants do not have. The task requires all three of the following components, each following from the paper's own findings and its call for further research. (1) Channel choice: how do local language skills, knowledge about the public service system, and other contextual factors influence older migrants' choices and practices among digital and traditional service delivery channels (in-person, telephone, digital), beyond the single case of Russian-speaking older migrants in Finland examined by the source? (2) The asymmetry mechanism: the paper's central theoretical observation is that the asymmetry between the construct of a self-serving digital citizen and the actual capacities of older service users has the potential to create services that produce anxiety, stress, and exclusion; through what concrete mechanisms does this asymmetry affect equity in access to rights and benefits — for instance, who ends up unable to obtain entitlements, delayed, or dependent on intermediaries, and with what distributional pattern across language, education, gender, and migration histories? (3) Design mitigation: the paper's policy discussion lists candidate remedies (simplicity, usability, reliability, multiple language options, plain-language forms, formal advisory services, and continued multichannel delivery) as implications of one qualitative case rather than evaluated design features; which service design features mitigate the stress, anxiety, and exclusion older migrants experience when accessing digital public services?

References

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