The digital age requires people of all ages to communicate and organise their lives through digital technologies. The project EQualCare (“Alone but connected? Digital (in)equalities in care work and generational relationships among older people living alone”) investigated how the growing population of older people living alone is man-aging this transition, how it shapes their (non-)digital social networks and what changes on local, regional, national and international levels need to be brought about to ensure (digital) equality. This white paper gives insight into the multi-method work that was done, summarises key findings, and provides recommendations for policy and practice.

EQualCare was a cross-cultural comparison and collaboration across Finland, Ger-many, Latvia and Sweden, with Finland and Sweden as two countries advanced in the digitalisation of civic and private life and thus providing a helpful contrast to Germany and Latvia that are at different levels of digitalisation. Their joint work comprised of four parts: 

• To begin with all four national researcher teams conducted respective critical document analyses of social policy documents and legislation, examining how ageing, living alone, digitalisation, and care-responsibilities are portrayed in the national policy documents. 

• Following, an analyses of existing national and EU data sets on ageing took place to draw comparative information on living conditions, income, health, use of dig-ital devices, and care work across the four countries. 

• The central part of EQualCare entailed a participatory action research (PAR) project that was conducted across the four countries and involved older people as co-researchers in nine local project teams. 

• The model of EQualCare was a participatory policy making one, whereby the work of one of the PAR projects was connected with the others, with the findings from the policy analyses and statistical analyses providing the backdrop and scaf-folding to develop the recommendations.

The project team was strongly multidisciplinary; bring together experienced re-searchers in anthropology, business organisation and management studies, cultural studies, education, gender studies, psychology, social psychology, social work and sociology.