Bridging Participation and Work in a Mature and Older People Community on Facebook in Brazil

Abstract

Purpose Brazil is undergoing accelerated demographic change and it will have the sixth oldest population in the world by 2050 (UN, 2022). Although the unemployment rate in Brazil is decreasing (PNAD Contínua, 2024), older adults, who represent 15% of the labor market, face many difficulties in remaining or returning to the formal job market, having to find alternative ways of earning income or staying active and productive. In this sense, this research aims to investigate the participation of Brazilian people aged 50 and over in an online community on Facebook focused on exchanging experiences and information about work in later life. We argue that the use of digital platforms can be a means of raising awareness about the scenario of the Brazilian labor market. Online groups can be a place to find job opportunities, expand social networks, develop skills for (re)insertion into the market, as well as being a channel for publicizing and conducting business among other mature people. Method In this exploratory research, we used Content Analysis (Bardin, 1977) to organize, systematize, and categorize data collected on a public Brazilian Facebook group with 33.794 members. The first phase (pre-analysis) consisted of skimming the feed,formulating hypotheses and objectives, and preparing the material. After collecting posts of the first quarter of 2024, in the second phase (material exploration) we coded every post to its unit of record and context, and grouped them into categories according to similarities or differences in semantic. We also analyzed the frequency and average engagement (likes and comments) of each category. The last phase is treatment of results and interpretation. Currently, we have used Nvivo to perform the analysis and further explore some categories. Results and Discussion In the first quarter of 2024, 366 posts were made by 119 different people. While one person posted 85 times, 76 people posted just once. The data indicate a predominance of men both in terms of individual posts and in the total number of authors, with a lower participation from women in both categories. The posts were categorized in 30 different themes, including news, personal service advertising, share of personal content, inspirational content, publicizing personal jobs, and educational and leisure opportunities. The categories with the highest engagement (sum of comments and likes) were inspirational content (n=833, average of 25.24 per post), personal service advertising (n=595, average of 11.44 per post), news (n=544, average of 7.6 per post), and publicizing personal jobs (n=491, average of 21.34 per post). The preliminary results indicate a variety of themes discussed in the group, even though its focus is work in later life. We could also point out that there is a plurality of voices and there is room for participation, despite only a small part (0.35%) of group members actively posted. Currently, we are working on further analyzing the content of work-related and inspirational content categories, as they had the highest engagement rate.