Disaggregating Digital Competence: Social Activity Participation and Depressive Symptoms Among Korean Older Adults

Digital competence is commonly measured as a single summed score in research on late-life mental health, and a recent analysis of the same national survey data used here reported no adjusted association with depressive symptoms. This study aimed to describe how two domains of digital device competence relate to depressive symptoms among Korean older adults, and to test whether social activity participation accounts for part of these relations. Using the 2023 National Survey of Older Koreans (N = 9951), principal component analysis, supported by categorical confirmatory factor analysis and a split-sample check, yielded two domains: procedurally demanding life-service competence and everyday communication and media-use competence. When both domains were entered simultaneously, each was negatively associated with depressive symptoms, and bootstrap analyses indicated significant indirect associations through social activity participation for both. A 10-item summed score of the same items also showed significant direct and indirect associations as well, and first-stage and direct coefficients did not differ significantly between domains in the primary models, so disaggregation did not recover a relation that aggregation had concealed. Direct-path differences between domains and exploratory education moderation depended on model specification. Because the data are cross-sectional, the findings describe associations rather than effects.