Social connectedness in older Urban African-American adults during the COVID-19 pandemic: the roles of education and partnership

Abstract

Objective

This study examined education, partnership status, and the moderating role of the lockdown period on social connectedness during the COVID-19 pandemic in a sample of urban African-American older adults.

Methods

Five hundred thirty-four African-American adults living in Detroit (91.0% female, M_age = 74.53) reported demographic information pre-pandemic and answered one social connectedness questionnaire between April and December 2020.

Results

Participants interviewed after the lockdown (post-June 2020) reported more loneliness than those interviewed during the lockdown (April–June, 2020). Married/partnered participants reported less loneliness and social isolation. Loneliness did not differ between those with high education levels interviewed during the lockdown compared to post-lockdown. However, among individuals with low education levels, those interviewed after the lockdown reported more loneliness than those interviewed during the lockdown period.

Conclusion

Our findings suggest partnership status is associated with more social connectedness during the pandemic and education accentuates the effects of forced isolation related to loneliness among urban African-American older adults.

Keywords:

• Loneliness
• social isolation
• COVID-19
• African American
• older adults

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank all members of the telephone outreach team who provided their time and support to this project. We would also like to thank JoAnn Smith, a long-serving Community Advisory Board member for her input on this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 These analyses were pre-registered for only data collected during lockdown, but analyses focusing on the full data collection period and the lockdown period, specifically, are described.

2 The patterns of results obtained from the imputed database did not change in significance or direction compared to the results obtained from listwise deletion.

3 Three outliers more than 3 standard deviations from the mean were found in loneliness and one in social isolation. Removal of outliers did not change the observed associations. Analyses are presented with the outliers retained.

4 Education was analyzed as a continuous moderator. To probe the interaction, education was recentered at 1 standard deviation above the mean (which corresponds to 4+ years of college) and 1 standard deviation below the mean, which corresponds to high school graduate/GED).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health, P30 AG015281, and the Michigan Center for Urban African American Aging Research.