Path analysis of social engagement, loneliness and cognitive function among Chinese older adults

ABSTRACT

This study established a research model to fully understand the relationship of social engagement, loneliness and cognitive function among Chinese older adults. In the latest wave (2018) of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS), a total of 12,852 participants aged 65 years and older were included in the study. Path analysis was performed to examine our hypotheses. The social engagement had a positive relationship with normal cognitive function while loneliness had a negative one, and the standardized regression weights were 0.618 (p < 0.01) and −0.046 (p < 0.01), respectively. Watching TV or listening to the radio had the greatest association with cognitive function, followed by housework, outdoor activities, reading newspapers or books, playing cards or mahjong, and raising domestic animals or pets. Loneliness played a mediating role between social engagement and cognitive function. Social engagement could be considered as one of the interventions to improve older adults’ health.

KEYWORDS:

• Social engagement
• loneliness
• cognitive function

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank all co-workers and the reviewers. We would also like to extend our sincere appreciation to the invaluable contributions by the team of the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey (CLHLS) for providing the data.

Disclosure statement

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

Contributions

SMM and JJC were co-first authors and had the equal contribution to the study. LL, SMM and JJC conceived and designed the study. SMM and JJC discussed the original idea, retrieving and organizing literature, completing statistical analyses, and drafting and revising the first manuscript together. WJZ helped to supervise the statistical analysis and give some useful ideas. LL helped to modify articles and supervised the whole study. All authors have read and approve the final manuscript.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

This study is a secondary analysis of the data from the CLHLS and the dataset could be applied free on the CLHLS website: https://opendata.pku.edu.cn/dataverse/CHADS. The CLHLS was approved by the Ethics Committee of Peking University (IRB00001052-13 074). Written informed consent was obtained from all participants for their participation in CLHLS study. The data were anonymized before its use and consent to participate from participants is unnecessary for this study.

Data availability statement

The dataset could be obtained from website of CLHLS http://opendata.pku.edu.cn/dataverse/CHADS

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2022.2151635.

Additional information

Funding

This study was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China in 2021 (No. 21BGL235).