Centre for Social Informatics

The COST Action International Interdisciplinary Network on Smart Healthy Age-friendly Environments (Net4Age-Friendly) started in end October 2020. The Action has formal representatives from 41 countries. The Action already gathers a network of 260 researchers from 50 countries around the world, two also from the Centre for Social Informatics, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Ljubljana (Dr. Vesna Dolničar, Dr. Simona Hvalič Touzery).

Due to the COVID-19 crisis and the restrictive measures taken worldwide, violence against women and girls seems to have increased. Women's rights groups and victims support groups reported an increase of domestic violence and dramatic effects on the sexual and reproductive rights of women and girls. However, another aspect of the crisis is still under-reported and official data is lacking: The effects of COVID-19 on cyber violence against girls and women are still under investigation.

The Centre for Social Informatics participated at 12th World Conference of Gerontechnology. We gave two presentations, among others on the psychosocial impacts of telemonitoring system utilization and on the psychological outcomes of telecare use in informal care and as i-evAALution research partner participated in the preparation of the presentation on the i-evAALution randomized control trial.

Dr. Katja Prevodnik presented the results of an intervention study on the use of telemedicine equipment among patients with chronic disease at the ISG 2020 conference, which took place in early October in virtual form. The research group was invited by prof. dr. Walter Boot, who organized a symposium about International perspectives on technology use: Adoption, proficiency, and relationships with health and well-being.

Barbara Brečko, PhD, member of the Centre for Social Informatics, published two articles in the special issue of Teorija in praksa. The first article was published together with Tanja Oblak Črnič, PhD and the second article was wrote together with MSc. Maša Kolenbrand and Tanja Oblak Črnič, PhD.

The researchers from the Center for Social Informatics published the article "Measuring internet skills in a general population: A large-scale validation of the short Internet Skills Scale in Slovenia". It presents the validation of the survey scale "Internet Skills Scale" using data from Slovenia. They confirmed that the scale has adequate internal, discriminant and criterion validity.