‘Nowadays you don’t even see your neighbours’: loneliness in the everyday lives of older Australians

Abstract

Loneliness is a pressing social issue for older people globally. Despite this, there is a paucity of studies on how older people themselves perceive loneliness and how service providers can support them. This study sought to address the gap using in-depth and semi-structured interviews with 60 older people and eight focus groups with aged care service providers in Australia in 2007. A purposive sampling strategy was employed to incorporate maximum participant variation. People 65 years and over were recruited from four large service providers in two Australian states. Our findings show that loneliness is influenced by private, relational and temporal dimensions and whether older people feel that they have, or are seen by others as having, a sense of connectedness with the wider community. Participants expressed the importance of maintaining social contact and having a sense of connection and belonging to the community. Our study highlights both the significance of gathering the views of older people to generate an understanding about loneliness and the need to recognise loneliness as a diverse and complex experience, bound to the context in which it is understood and perceived and not synonymous with social isolation. Such an understanding can be used to both evaluate and improve upon programmes that address loneliness and to help maintain an integration of older people in the community.

Chinese older adults’ resilience to the loneliness of living alone: A qualitative study

“…This framework took a broader interaction perspective by understanding loneliness among older adults not only from a static perspective, but also from a developmental view of personality and life events. Studies on loneliness experiences, coping resources, and intervention evaluation supported the validity of the framework (Eloranta, Routasalo, & Arve, 2008;Pitkala, Routasalo, Kautiainen, & Tilvis, 2009;Stanley et al, 2010).…”

Conceptual relations between loneliness and culture

“…Nevertheless, being diverse and complex experiences that are contextually determined [27 ], it is no surprise that there are differences across cultures in the ways loneliness is experienced [4,27 ]. Between Canadian and Czech cultures in one study [36] and between Canadian and Croatian cultures in another [37], differences were found in the extent to which loneliness was experienced in terms of emotional distress, social inadequacy and alienation, growth and discovery, interpersonal isolation, and self-alienation.…”

“…. nowadays you don't even see your neighbours, you don't know them hardly (89 year old, female)' [27 ].…”

The moderating effect of spiritual well-being on the association between depressive state and living arrangement in the elderly in rural Okinawa

“…Therefore, in hierarchical multiple regression analysis, all demographic variables were used as control variables. 38) , and this reduces social integration, leading to less social support and feelings of isolation 39) . Older Korean people living alone have also been reported to have lower self-esteem and life satisfaction than those living with others 4,40) , which in turn leads to a higher prevalence of depression 41) .…”