What Time Diaries Show That Loneliness Surveys Do Not

Ask Americans whether they are lonely and the answer depends heavily on who is asking and how. Gallup’s 2023 global survey put loneliness at 24% worldwide. Cigna’s 2020 workplace survey put it at 61% among US adults. The Harvard Making Caring Common report from 2021 landed at 36%. These are not small discrepancies, and they cannot be resolved by picking the “right” number, because each survey asked a different question, to a different population, using a different scale.

There is, however, a second kind of measure available for at least one slice of this question: how much time people actually spend socializing, as recorded in structured time diaries rather than recalled feelings. The American Time Use Survey, an ongoing federal data collection effort, asks respondents to log their activities across a full day, hour by hour, rather than asking them to characterize their emotional state. WBUR’s reporting in February 2024 on this data found that face-to-face socializing among Americans has declined, a decline that began before the pandemic and continued after it. This is not a self-report of feeling disconnected. It is an administrative record of time allocated to being with other people.

Two different things being measured

The gap between these instruments is not simply a measurement nuisance. It reflects the distinction between loneliness, a subjective state, and isolation, a structural property of how someone’s time and network are actually arranged. Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s 2015 meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science treated these as separable risk factors precisely because they do not move together: living alone, being objectively isolated, and feeling lonely each carried distinct, independent associations with early mortality. A person can log abundant time with others and still report loneliness. A person can spend most of a day alone and report contentment. The correlation between the two is real but far from complete.

Time-use data has an advantage that loneliness surveys lack: instrument stability. The American Time Use Survey asks the same kind of question, in the same format, year over year. It does not swap out a bespoke five-item scale for a different bespoke five-item scale the way loneliness surveys routinely do. The AARP Foundation’s 2018 survey of adults 45 and older used the 20-item UCLA Loneliness Scale, which is at least comparable to the wider academic literature, and it found that one in three respondents in that age group were lonely. Cigna’s instrument, by contrast, is proprietary and not directly comparable to the UCLA scale, which is one reason its 61% figure sits so far above AARP’s third. The BMC Public Health review of the loneliness research field in 2023 named this inconsistency in measurement as a structural barrier to comparing findings across studies, not an incidental flaw.

Against that backdrop, a behavioral record of actual time spent with others functions almost as an anchor. It cannot resolve disagreements about how much loneliness there is, because it is not measuring loneliness at all. But it can independently confirm or complicate the isolation half of the story, and here the confirmation is unwelcome: less time face-to-face with other people, across a multi-year trend that predates COVID-19 and did not reverse afterward.

What the two measures agree on, and what they don’t

Where self-report and observed data line up, the case for concern strengthens. The Survey Center on American Life’s 2021 report on friendship found that the share of Americans with no close friends rose from 3% in 1990 to 12% in 2021, and that the share of men with six or more close friends fell from 55% to 27% over the same period. That is a self-reported count, not a diary entry, but it is a count of a concrete quantity — friends named — rather than a rating of a mood. It points in the same direction as the time-use decline: fewer relationships, less contact, independent of how any given respondent chooses to characterize their feelings about it.

Where the measures diverge is in magnitude and volatility. Loneliness prevalence estimates swing by 30 to 40 percentage points depending on instrument and year, which makes trend lines built from self-report alone unreliable guides to whether the underlying problem is worsening. The National Academies’ 2020 consensus report used yet another approach for older adults specifically, estimating that roughly a quarter of adults 65 and older are socially isolated based on network structure rather than feeling — a figure that sits closer in spirit to a time-use measure than to a loneliness scale, and that is worth keeping separate from AARP’s one-in-three self-reported loneliness figure for the same broad age band.

What would settle this

The strongest evidence would come from a study that measured both constructs in the same sample at the same time: a time-diary or administrative contact record alongside a validated loneliness scale, collected longitudinally, so that researchers could see whether declining face-to-face time predicts rising self-reported loneliness at the individual level, or whether the two run on separate tracks entirely. No source reviewed here does this. Until one does, the honest conclusion is that behavioral data shows Americans spending less time with other people, self-report data shows a lot of Americans feeling lonely by some measures and fewer by others, and the connection between those two facts is asserted more often than it is demonstrated.