Research
Everything the Center has published, most recent first. 257 items.
10 May 2024
Most of the evidence behind youth loneliness policy comes from single snapshots. A brief on what that design cannot show, and why the gap matters for how governments target interventions.
27 April 2024
The claim that loneliness carries mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day is repeated in nearly every public account of the loneliness literature. Tracing it back shows a comparison of comparisons, not a replicated finding.
9 April 2024
The National Academies and the American Heart Association both call for routine clinical assessment of social isolation. The mortality evidence behind the recommendation is strong; the evidence that screening changes outcomes is not.
8 April 2024
The UK, the US, Japan and Gallup's 142-country survey all report loneliness prevalence, but they ask different questions of different populations at different times. An examination of what the divergent figures actually measure.
1 April 2024
The World Health Organization's new Commission on Social Connection leans on a Gallup-Meta survey covering 142 countries. Its sampling frame has gaps that matter for exactly the populations policy is meant to reach.
19 March 2024
A 2022 American Heart Association statement split social isolation into objective and perceived components, unsettling a widely cited National Academies figure that treated isolation as a single measurable state.
13 March 2024
The claim that loneliness carries a mortality risk comparable to smoking 15 cigarettes a day appears throughout policy and press coverage. The number's origin is less precise than its current use suggests.
1 March 2024
A cross-sectional study of remote healthcare workers reports significant associations between workplace isolation and well-being, but omits the number that would let readers judge how much it matters.
24 February 2024
Across a decade of reviews, one conclusion recurs almost unchanged: social isolation and loneliness predict disease and death, but the evidence on what actually reduces them remains thin. This piece traces why that gap persists.
22 February 2024
Self-reported loneliness rates vary widely by instrument, but time-use data measuring actual face-to-face contact tells a more consistent, and more troubling, story.
17 February 2024
A close look at what loneliness surveys actually measure, and why a well-established prevalence figure is not the same thing as evidence that an intervention will lower it.
7 February 2024
Younger adults consistently report more loneliness than older adults across surveys and countries. The literature offers at least four distinct explanations, and they are not interchangeable.
22 January 2024
The UCLA Loneliness Scale is the most widely used instrument in the field, but its structure carries assumptions about what loneliness is that shape every prevalence figure built on it.
13 January 2024
A close look at what it takes for a loneliness survey to show a genuine trend, using Cigna's year-over-year claim, Gallup's paired 2023 releases, and Japan's JACSIS panel as contrasting cases.
12 January 2024
A close read of the 2022 American Heart Association scientific statement on social isolation shows a report that names the limits of its evidence more precisely than most peer documents, and where that candor runs out.
6 January 2024
Surveys report loneliness rates near 60% for adults aged 18 to 25, but the subgroup driving much of that figure -- mothers with young children -- receives almost none of the policy attention aimed at the age bracket as a whole.
2 January 2024
A widely cited claim that 72% of people worldwide feel socially connected comes from a single self-report item in a Meta-funded Gallup survey. What it measured, and what policy bodies are doing with it, are not the same thing.
31 December 2023
Survey after survey finds young adults lonelier than the old, the reverse of what most people assume. The pattern is real but the explanations for it are contested.
30 December 2023
Several widely cited claims about rising loneliness compare figures collected in different ways at different times. A look at what genuine within-series comparability requires, and which sources actually have it.
24 December 2023
Most published loneliness figures come from one-time surveys of different people at one moment. A handful of studies follow the same people over time, and the difference in what each design can support is larger than it looks.
23 December 2023
Two widely cited figures on young-adult loneliness -- 61% and 27% -- come from surveys with different modes, timing, and age brackets. The gap says as much about sampling as about the underlying condition.
20 December 2023
The Surgeon General's National Strategy calls for reforming digital environments to reduce loneliness. The evidence base for that pillar is thinner than for any other part of the strategy, and the gap matters for what regulators can credibly do next.
15 December 2023
Gallup and Meta's 2023 global survey did not simply ask a loneliness question in reverse. It measured a different construct, and the two figures it produced alongside Gallup's separate loneliness data do not add up to 100%.
22 November 2023
Aggregate loneliness figures place young adults above the average, but the surveys that break the group down show something more specific: a concentration of loneliness among the very youngest and among new parents, not a uniform youth effect.