Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London, UK.
Centre for Health Economics, Monash University, Australia.
Soc Sci Med. 2023 Mar;320:115692. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115692. Epub 2023 Jan 21.
There has been growing concern that loneliness has increased throughout the COVID-19 lockdowns, and that the burden has fallen heavily on young people. This is important because loneliness is strongly linked to worse health outcomes.
We examine whether and how loneliness among young people changed during the pandemic across the different lockdown periods in 2020 and 2021. We also assess differences by gender, socioeconomic status, and economic activity before the COVID-19 outbreak.
We use nine waves of longitudinal data from the COVID-19 supplement of the UK Household Longitudinal Study (Understanding Society), collected between April 2020 and September 2021. We apply an individual fixed-effects event study design, which compares the loneliness reported by the same individual over lockdown transitions. We focus on loneliness reported by 1870 respondents aged between 16 and 24 years and compare it with pre-pandemic baselines.
We find that the loneliness of young people tracked the extent of lockdown restrictions but had returned to baseline levels by September 2021. This loneliness response was more pronounced for females than males but similar for young people across higher and lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
These results suggest that policy interventions aimed at increasing opportunities for in-person social interactions for young people in 'normal' times, might have some success in tackling loneliness, particularly for young females.
人们越来越担心，在整个 COVID-19 封锁期间，孤独感有所增加，而且年轻人的负担沉重。这很重要，因为孤独感与更糟糕的健康结果密切相关。
我们研究了孤独感是否以及如何在 2020 年和 2021 年的不同封锁期间在年轻人中发生变化。我们还评估了性别、社会经济地位和 COVID-19 爆发前的经济活动方面的差异。
我们使用了 UK Household Longitudinal Study（理解社会）的 COVID-19 补充调查的九轮纵向数据，收集时间为 2020 年 4 月至 2021 年 9 月。我们采用个体固定效应事件研究设计，该设计比较了同一人在封锁过渡期间报告的孤独感。我们专注于 1870 名年龄在 16 至 24 岁之间的受访者报告的孤独感，并将其与大流行前的基线进行比较。
我们发现，年轻人的孤独感与封锁限制的程度相关，但到 2021 年 9 月已恢复到基线水平。这种孤独感反应在女性中比男性更为明显，但在社会经济背景较高和较低的年轻人中相似。
这些结果表明，旨在增加年轻人在“正常”时期进行面对面社交互动机会的政策干预措施，可能在解决孤独感方面取得一些成功，尤其是对年轻女性而言。
