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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2023 Oct 30.
Published in final edited form as: Gerontechnology. 2020 Aug 29;20(1):3024.

Table 1.

Description of questionnaires

Category Questionnaires Description
Demographics and health status Demographic and health questionnaire (Czaja et al., 2006) Self-report demographic information (e.g., sex, age, education, marital status, race/ethnicity, type of housing), and health status
Social networking and technology use experiences Social Networking Questionnaire Self-report on frequency of use of video chat (e.g. Skype, FaceTime), response options 0= Never heard of this, 1 = Never, 2 = Once or twice a year, 3= A few times a month, 4 = At least once a week, 5 = Daily; who they connected with on video chat
Adapted Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness Questionnaire Adapted the Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness scales from the TAM (Davis, 1989; e.g., “video chat is easy to use”; “video chat increases communication”), with response options 1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly agree.
Computer Proficiency Questionnaire-12 (Boot et al., 2015) Assessed participants’ computer proficiency using six subscales: a) computer basics, b) printing, c) communication, d) Internet, e) scheduling software, f) multimedia use. Each subscale has two questions. To evaluate users’ proficiency in using video chat, we added three additional items: camera, external camera, and microphone. Participants rated their ability on a 5-point scale (1 = Never tried, 2 = Not at all, 3 = Not very easily, 4 = Somewhat easily, 5 = Very easily).
Usability evaluation System Usability Scale (Brooke, 1996) Quantifies the usability of user-machine interfaces, consisting of 10 standard questions ((e.g., 1 found the system unnecessarily complex; 1 felt very confident using the system), with response options 1 = Strongly disagree, 2 = Disagree, 3 = Neutral, 4 = Agree, 5 = Strongly agree. Higher scores indicating greater usability.
Conversation topics of interest Conversation Topic Questionnaire Measures interest in 21 conversation topics, with response options 1 = not at all interested, 5 = extremely interested. Topics include aging, art, books, college experience, cooking, education, exercise, family, fashion, gardening, health, hobbies, holidays, movies, music, pets, sports, technology, television shows, travel, and volunteering.
Social engagement UCLA Loneliness scale (Version 3; Russell, 1996) Measures the feeling of loneliness, using ratings of 20 items on a 4-point scale (1= Never, 2= Rarely, 3= Sometimes, 4= Always). Higher scores indicate greater degrees of loneliness (maximum score 80).
Friendship scale (Hawthorne, 2006) Measures social isolation and social connection, consisting of six items, with response options, 0= Not at all, 1=Occasionally, 2= About half the time, 3= Most of the time, 4= Almost always. Score range is 0-24, with 0-11 very socially isolated; 12-15 isolated or low-level social support; 16-18 some social support; 19-21 socially connected; and 22-24 very socially connected.