Abstract
In the public debate, it has been argued that there is a “loneliness epidemic” in Western societies. We thus investigated trajectories of loneliness and examined whether current cohorts of older adults indeed report higher levels and steeper age-related increases in loneliness than earlier-born peers. Towards that end, we combined loneliness data from independent samples recruited in 1990 and 2010 to age-match 1,068 longitudinal observations from n=257 participants in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) and n=383 participants in Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II). We use items selected from the UCLA loneliness scales, matched cohorts on an observation-by-observation basis, estimated multilevel models that orthogonalize between-person and within-person age effects, and also examined the role of possible explanatory factors. Results reveal that at age 79, the later-born BASE-II cohort reported substantially lower levels of loneliness than the earlier-born BASE cohort (d = –0.84), with the cohort variable explaining more than 12% of the variance. Age trajectories, however, were in parallel with no evidence of cohort differences in rates of within-person age-related change. We also found that differences in gender, education, cognitive functioning, and external control beliefs accounted for the lion’s share of cohort-related differences in levels of loneliness. To illustrate, the historical reductions in levels of loneliness for the later-born cohort are basically cut in half for those who perceive higher levels of external control. Loneliness among older adults has shifted to markedly lower levels today, but the rate at which loneliness increases with age proceeds similarly as it did two decades ago.
Presenters
Bianca SuanetAssociate Professor, Sociology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Noord-Holland, Netherlands
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
LONELINESS, INDIVIDUALIZATION, SOCIETAL CHANGE, CONTROL BELIEFS, RESOURCES, GENERATIONS
