WWCW Highlight Call: Understanding social isolation and subjective wellbeing across the life course: a project using five British birth cohort studies

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Social connectedness is considered to be a basic psychological need, and social isolation is associated with a range of negative outcomes including poorer mental health, cognitive decline and mortality. Recent policy efforts have been set up to address some of these challenges, including a drive to understand and reduce social isolation and loneliness. The existing literature considers social isolation to be an objective characteristic of someone's experience and it is assessed based on factors such as living alone, having few social relationships and infrequent social contact. Loneliness, on the other hand, is a subjective assessment of one's relationships and experience. Despite this increase in policy interest, there lacks empirical evidence from large scale, representative datasets on the extent of social isolation experienced by individuals through their lives and the extent of the link between social isolation and wellbeing at different ages and in different generations. This research proposal aims to address this gap by documenting the life course perspective on the relationship between social isolation and wellbeing; and uncover generational differences in trends of social isolation and wellbeing. We will make use of five longitudinal British cohort studies following children born in 1946, 1958, 1970, 1989 and 2001 to generate comparable measures of social isolation to understand the patterns and trends by life course and by generation. This data intensive aspect of the project will generate harmonised variables which will be an important resource for the research community facilitating future research in this area. Much of the previous research focuses on social isolation in late adulthood, this proposed research will extend the existing literature by examining how social isolation varies across the whole life course, from childhood, adolescence, early-adulthood, mid-life and older ages. Thereafter we will investigate whether things have changed across generations in the UK over the last 60 years and investigate whether there are any observed differences. Differences might be expected as a result of different exposures by each generation, for example, increased access to higher education, changes in the labour market or access to the internet. These analyses will be able to confirm whether any differences are observed in these national cohorts and if yes, the direction of observed changes. Next, we will examine the relationship between social isolation, loneliness and subjective wellbeing at different ages. Unpacking the relationship between social isolation, wellbeing and age is important for developing life course specific policy interventions. In order to understand these relationships in more detail, we will investigate whether the experiences of social isolation are different for men and women, and whether they are differentially associated with wellbeing by gender. Similarly, we will investigate the experience of social isolation by socio-economic advantage or disadvantage and investigate how it is associated with wellbeing across these groups. Using the loneliness measures (where available) we will examine in what ways social isolation and loneliness are interrelated. Social isolation and loneliness are not highly associated as it is possible to be socially isolated and prefer seclusion and inversely to be socially connected but to still feel lonely. Hence, we will investigate whether social isolation and loneliness separately explain the variation in wellbeing. We will also examine groups of individuals based on whether they are experiencing both, either or neither to help understand the relationships of these different combinations of experience with subjective wellbeing at different ages.