A Longitudinal Analysis of Loneliness Among Older People in Great Britain

ABSTRACT

Longitudinal studies of loneliness among older people are comparatively rare. At 8 years after the initial survey in 1999–2000, we followed up on the 999 people aged 65+ years who were living in the community in the United Kingdom. We found that 583 participants were still alive, and 287 (58%) participated in the follow-up survey. The overall prevalence of loneliness at both time points was very similar, with 9% reporting severe loneliness; 30% reporting that they were sometimes lonely, and 61% reporting that they were never lonely. We developed a 12-category typology to describe changes in loneliness across the follow-up period and report that 60% of participants had a stable loneliness rating, with 40–50% rating themselves as never lonely, and 20–25% rating themselves as persistently lonely; 25% demonstrated decreased loneliness, and approximately 15% demonstrated worse loneliness. Changes in loneliness were linked with changes in marital status, living arrangements, social networks, and physical health. Importantly improvements in physical health and improved social relationships were linked to reduced levels of loneliness. This result suggests that strategies to combat loneliness are not confined to the arena of social interventions such as befriending services, which aim to build and support social embeddedness, but may also result from the treatment of chronic and long-term health conditions.

Keywords:

• loneliness
• longitudinal study
• older people

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due to the ONS Omnibus Survey staff and ONS Qualitative Research Unit for overseeing the Quality of Life Interview baseline survey and processing the data. Those who carried out the original analysis and collection of the data hold no responsibility for the further analysis and interpretation of them. Material from the ONS Omnibus Survey, made available through ONS, has been used with the permission of the Controller of The Stationary Office. The dataset is held on the Data Archive at the University of Essex. The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (award no. L480254003 [Quality of Life]). The Quality of Life Questionnaire was also partly funded by grants that were held collaboratively by Professor Christina Victor and Professor John Bond (L480254042 [Loneliness and Social Isolation], also part of the ESRC Growing Older Research Programme) and by Professor Shah Ebrahim (Medical Research Council Health Services Research Collaboration [Health and Disability]). The present authors are grateful for their support.

The postal follow-up study of the sample was funded by the UK cross-research council New Dynamics of Ageing Programme. We are grateful for their support (New Dynamics of Ageing Programme grant reference number RES-352-25-0001). The sponsors played no role in the design, execution, analysis, interpretation, and writing of the study.