Understanding social isolation and loneliness at different ages

The research project, led by Dr Praveetha Patalay,  aims to examine the links between social isolation, loneliness and wellbeing.

Using data from five British longitudinal cohort studies – following children born in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1989-90 and 2000-01 – her team will look at whether levels of social connectedness and loneliness, and their relationship to subjective wellbeing, change over people’s lives. They will then investigate whether these patterns vary between generations.

Despite an increase in policy interest, there is little evidence documenting the associations between social isolation, loneliness and subjective wellbeing across our lives and between generations. This research project aims to address this gap, while also generating a range of comparable ‘harmonised’ measures of social isolation for future research.