Loneliness more likely to decrease with age, study finds
A new study has suggested that loneliness decreases with age. Furthermore, it appears to be less prevalent in collectivist societies than in individualistic ones and less common in women than in men.
New research shows that young people are much more likely than older persons to feel lonely, that persons in countries that are collectivist rather than individualistic are less inclined to feel lonely, and that loneliness is more likely to affect men than women.
The study, which appears in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, draws on a newly published significant global dataset that the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) gathered for his or her “Loneliness Experiment.”
Loneliness
In recent years, loneliness has turned into a focus of research as your body of evidence demonstrating its effects on both individuals and society is growing. Loneliness negatively influences people’s well-being and the economy, and it does increase the likelihood a person will need medical care.
The authors of today's study state that loneliness could be understood as “the discrepancy between actual and desired social relationships.”
According to the definition, two people who have the same number of social relationships may experience loneliness differently if one desires more social relationships compared to the other.
Conversely, two people who want the same number of social relationships may experience different degrees of loneliness if one of them has more social relationships.
While researchers understand that many other factors make a difference loneliness, few studies have already been large or diverse enough to get an accurate picture in regards to what these may be and how they might interact.
To handle this, the authors of today's study drew on a big and diverse new dataset to explore the ways in which culture, age, and gender affect loneliness.
More than 46,000 participants
The study drew on the BBC’s Loneliness Experiment dataset. This dataset contains information from almost 55,000 people aged between 16 and 99 from 237 countries, islands, and territories, making it one of the major and most various of its kind.
The authors of today's study focused on a subset of the data, including persons who had indicated how old they are and specified that they were a man or a female. There have been insufficient data open to include those who chose “other” as their gender. Altogether, they used data from 46,054 people.
To look for the participants’ degree of individualism or collectivism, the authors drew on a previous study that assigned relative individualism or collectivism to 101 countries. The participants in the current study only included those that indicated that these were from one of these 101 countries.
The researchers asked the participants various questions to determine their loneliness:
Do you feel too little companionship?
- Do you feel left out?
- Do you are feeling isolated from others?
- Do you feel in tune with persons around you?
- The participants responded on a scale of one to five, indicating how often they experienced these feelings. One indicated never, and five indicated always.
Source: www.medicalnewstoday.com
