AGE-FRIENDLY CROSS-MEDIA PUBLICATION DESIGN FOR GRANDPARENT-GRANDCHILD CARE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ELDERLY MEDIA BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Against the backdrop of China’s deep aging society and the prevalence of grandparent-led intergenerational childcare, grandparents’ demand for scientific parenting knowledge continues to rise. However, existing parenting media suffer from inadequate age-friendly adaptation and limited formats. Current research mostly focuses on age-friendly modification of single media types, lacking systematic cross-media collaborative design frameworks and targeted studies for intergenerational childcare scenarios. This is a conceptual study that takes Universal Design Theory and Cognitive Aging Theory as its analytical framework. This study employs literature research, comparative analysis and theoretical deduction methods. It sorts out the physiological and cognitive traits as well as media usage behaviors of the elderly under China’s socio-cultural context, summarizes media use constraints from perception, cognition and emotion dimensions, and systematically compares age-adaptive design features of print and digital media from information presentation, interaction logic and scenario adaptation perspectives. The conceptual study reveal that Chinese seniors live in a hybrid media ecosystem dominated by traditional media and supplemented by digital media. Print media has prominent advantages in low cognitive load, high fault tolerance and emotional identification, while digital media shows potential in multi-sensory information supplementation, scenario-based interaction and real-time content updating. The synergistic complementarity of the two forms the core logic of age-friendly cross-media design. This study extracts five key influencing factors and proposes a conceptual framework for age-friendly cross-media publication design, which provides theoretical basis and practical guidance for developing age-friendly cross-media publications tailored to intergenerational childcare scenarios.

Keywords: Age-Friendly Design, Cross-Media Publication, Cognitive Aging, Universal Design, Intergenerational Childcare