Research
Everything the Center has published, most recent first. 257 items.
17 August 2025
The Commission on Social Connection's June 2025 report links loneliness to an estimated 871,000 deaths a year. An assessment of what that figure rests on, how the report hedged it, and why the technology question was the hardest part for it to hold.
12 August 2025
A new Health & Place study finds third places disappearing fastest in vulnerable and rural census tracts. What the study measured, and what its sampling frame can and cannot tell us about who lost access.
6 August 2025
Gallup's global surveys and Harvard's Making Caring Common report reach opposite conclusions about how lonely young adults are relative to other age groups. The gap traces to what each instrument actually asks.
17 July 2025
The health effects of loneliness and social isolation are well quantified. The economic costs are not. A look at what the major reports actually claim, and what they don't.
10 July 2025
The evidence linking social isolation to cardiovascular disease is consistently observational. The proposed biological mechanism has never been tested by the kind of trial that would confirm it is causal.
6 July 2025
The National Academies and the American Heart Association both call for routine clinical assessment of social isolation. The evidence behind that call is strong on risk and thin on what to do next.
5 July 2025
The Commission on Social Connection's flagship report, published 30 June, puts 1 in 6 people worldwide as affected by loneliness and links disconnection to 871,000 deaths a year. The headline figure measures a subjective state; most of the interventions that follow target network structure.
25 June 2025
National loneliness figures for young adults compress very different experiences into one number. Breaking the group down by living situation, work status, and gender changes the picture considerably.
19 June 2025
Cigna's 2025 report puts American loneliness at 57%. Other surveys say 36%, 33%, or one in three. The gap is not noise -- it is a measurement problem.
16 June 2025
The loneliness literature is rich in positive associations and short on null results. A methods look at what would have to be true, and measured how, to falsify the epidemic claim.
6 June 2025
The claim that loneliness carries mortality risk comparable to smoking traces to one 2010 meta-analysis. What later work has and has not confirmed is a narrower finding than the headline figure suggests.
31 May 2025
Gallup's global survey found 72% of people feel socially connected and nearly half report no loneliness at all. Set against the epidemic framing, the figures require some reconciling rather than dismissing.
30 May 2025
A look at how loneliness came to be measured -- from multi-item psychological scales to the one-line survey questions now used in national surveillance -- and what changes when the instrument changes.
28 May 2025
Social prescribing has become a default policy response to loneliness, but the trial evidence behind it comes almost entirely from older-adult populations. Whether it transfers to young adults is a different question.
27 May 2025
Consensus reports and scientific statements on social isolation in older adults keep naming the same gap: almost no randomized evidence tells clinicians what to do about it.
15 May 2025
Most evidence tying adolescent social media use to loneliness is cross-sectional. A look at what the small number of longitudinal studies show, and what they still cannot resolve.
12 May 2025
The comparison between loneliness and smoking traces back to one 2015 meta-analysis. Tracking its path through a Surgeon General advisory and a wave of press coverage shows what got carried forward and what got left behind.
10 May 2025
The comparison between loneliness and smoking, repeated in the 2023 Surgeon General advisory and widely since, traces back to a single analytic move made in 2010. It has not been independently replicated on its own terms.
24 April 2025
The CDC's 2024 loneliness surveillance report is built on the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, a state-by-state telephone survey with its own sampling logic. That logic shapes the numbers more than the topline suggests.
15 April 2025
National loneliness figures are usually reported as a single number. Broken down by sex and age, the friendship data shows a specific, large decline concentrated among men, distinct from the youth-loneliness story usually told.
11 April 2025
A look at what the loneliness literature actually says about economic cost and cost-effectiveness, and why the figures most often quoted are not what they appear to be.
9 April 2025
The 2023 Surgeon General advisory's claim that about half of U.S. adults are lonely rests on a mix of instruments and time points. What it establishes is narrower than the headline suggests.
28 March 2025
A close look at what happens when the same organisation tracks loneliness or connection over time: whether the instrument, sample, and question wording stay fixed, and what changes when they don't.
27 March 2025
National loneliness statistics vary by a factor of two depending on the instrument used. That variation is not noise to be averaged away -- it defines the limits of what the numbers can justify in policy.