Research
Everything the Center has published, most recent first. 257 items.
9 July 2022
Meta-analyses put loneliness and social isolation on par with established mortality risk factors, but the proposed biological pathway connecting them is far less tested than the association itself.
4 July 2022
A look at the twenty-item UCLA Loneliness Scale, the instrument behind most credible loneliness prevalence figures for older adults, and the assumptions built into its design.
23 June 2022
A close look at how differing sampling frames and populations, not a real change in loneliness, explain why national estimates range from 33% to 61%.
17 June 2022
Surveys ask people whether they feel lonely; administrative and demographic data record whether they live alone or see anyone regularly. The two measures diverge, and policy built on one without the other risks missing who is actually at risk.
22 May 2022
A comparison between loneliness and smoking 15 cigarettes a day appears across public health messaging, government reports, and journalism. The claim traces to a single 2010 meta-analysis and does not appear to have been independently replicated with that specific figure.
20 May 2022
Survey after survey finds loneliness highest among people in their twenties, not the elderly. The evidence review examines three competing explanations and what distinguishes them.
17 May 2022
Most loneliness surveys of young adults are cross-sectional. Explaining what that design can and cannot support, and what following the same people over time would add.
1 May 2022
A comparison of the major loneliness surveys of the past four years shows sharply different prevalence figures and almost no way to tell which populations, mechanisms, or interventions actually move them.
15 April 2022
The National Academies' one-in-four isolation estimate and AARP's one-in-three loneliness estimate for older adults measure different things, using different instruments, and should not be added or averaged.
7 April 2022
Julianne Holt-Lunstad's 2010 finding that social connection predicts a 50% greater likelihood of survival has become the most quoted number in loneliness policy. Tracing its use shows how a pooled effect size hardened into a fact about individuals.
6 April 2022
Cigna reported that 73% of workers aged 18-22 were lonely; Harvard's Making Caring Common project reported serious loneliness among 61% of adults aged 18-25. The gap is mostly an artefact of thresholds, sampling frames and collection dates, and it matters for what governments are being asked to fund.
29 March 2022
Five years of social prescribing reviews report the same finding: participants feel better, and no one can say whether they would have felt better anyway.
28 March 2022
Cigna's widely cited 2020 finding that 61% of U.S. adults are lonely has shaped policy talk about remote work and Gen Z. The instrument behind it differs from the academic standard in ways that matter.
10 March 2022
The 2020 National Academies report on isolation in older adults is unusually candid about the limits of its evidence base. That candor is itself worth examining.
21 February 2022
Claims that loneliness among 18-25s is rising usually rest on repeated survey series. A close look at what within-series comparability requires, and where the major U.S. series fall short of it.
3 February 2022
Social prescribing has become the default policy response to loneliness in the UK and beyond. The evidence base for it remains thin, uncontrolled, and rarely measures loneliness at all.
2 February 2022
A 2015 meta-analysis found that social isolation and loneliness predicted mortality more strongly in samples averaging under 65 than in older cohorts -- a result that complicates the policy focus on aging populations.
7 January 2022
A review of recent surveys and meta-analyses shows isolation and loneliness are measured differently, predict mortality differently, and are frequently reported as though they were interchangeable.
4 January 2022
Cigna's widely repeated 61% loneliness figure and the National Academies' one-in-four isolation figure describe different things, in different populations, using different instruments. The gap explains most of the confusion in press coverage.
28 December 2021
The UK and Japan both created ministerial posts for loneliness, but the surveys underneath those policies use different questions, timeframes, and populations, which makes the resulting prevalence figures difficult to compare.
19 December 2021
Survey after survey finds adults under 25 lonelier than adults over 65, reversing what earlier decades of research assumed. The pattern is consistent, but the explanations for it are not.
25 November 2021
Comparing the effect sizes across the major mortality meta-analyses of social connection, and what gets lost when coverage collapses them into a single statistic about equivalence to smoking.
17 November 2021
The National Academies' 2020 report split social isolation from loneliness into separately measured constructs. That revision changes what the one-in-four and one-in-three statistics for older adults actually mean.
25 October 2021
The Making Caring Common report attributes rising loneliness to the pandemic and, implicitly, to the poor quality of technology-mediated contact. Its own data support a narrower claim than its title suggests.