Social Integration and Sleep Quality during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Prospective Evidence from a Study of Retired Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Background

Growing evidence has documented the adverse impact of the global COVID-19 pandemic on sleep quality among older adults. Given the negative consequences of poor sleep, it is critical to identify factors that provide older adults with resilience against worsening sleep quality. Social integration may represent one such resilience factor.

Purpose

This study evaluated the association of social integration and sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods

113 retired older adults completed assessments of their social integration after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of their sleep quality before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results

Higher levels of social integration were associated with better sleep quality during the COVID-19 pandemic, even when statistically controlling for pre-pandemic sleep quality. Sex-stratified analyses showed that this association was driven by women in our sample.

Conclusions

Social integration may confer resilience against poor sleep quality, especially in older adult women. Additional research is warranted to assess candidate mechanisms and moderators of the link between social integration and sleep quality.

Acknowledgments

The authors gratefully acknowledge Kate Hart for her role in data collection. An earlier version of this work was presented at the 2021 Virtual Sleep conference.

Disclosure statement

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

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute of Aging (R01AG047139), the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (T32HL007560; T32HL082610), and the National Institute of Mental Health (T32MH019986).