Abstract
While age has been identified as a risk factor for loneliness, whether it is a necessary or sufficient condition for loneliness has never been examined. This is the first study that applies fuzzy-set QCA, a special type of set-theoretic method, to discover the necessary and sufficient causal conditions for loneliness, respectively, among adults in the UK, analysing the data collected from the UK sample of Round 6 of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2012, n = 2163). It firstly examines the configurations of five conditions: being female, old age, not living with spouse/partner, bad health, and not being frequently social with others. Gender was found neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for loneliness, and old age was close to being a necessary condition and became necessary when united with any of the other conditions; the configuration of not living with spouse/partner and not healthy and not frequently social with others is a sufficient condition. Robustness of results was tested with two different conditions (a limiting illness and a confidante), and a separate analysis on the absence of loneliness was conducted. The effect of the unbalanced distribution of cases across different values of the outcome was highlighted as a source of uncertainty, and the results on the absence of loneliness are different from those on its presence.
Highlights
Loneliness is an unpleasant psychological reaction to the absence of desired social relations (Anderson 1998; De Jong Gierveld 1987; Perlman and Peplau 1981; Townsend 1968; Victor et al 2000; Weiss 1973), and medical researchers have established its detrimentalSchool of Applied Social Sciences, Durham University, Durham DH1 3HN, UKK
Using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), this study has produced some causal analyses of loneliness that are different from those produced with statistical methods
The causes of loneliness are studied as configurations rather than individual risk factors
Summary
Loneliness is an unpleasant psychological reaction to the absence of desired social relations (Anderson 1998; De Jong Gierveld 1987; Perlman and Peplau 1981; Townsend 1968; Victor et al 2000; Weiss 1973), and medical researchers have established its detrimentalK. The study of loneliness has become a burgeoning interdisciplinary field in the social sciences of ageing and public health Given these undesirable effects of loneliness, to find out what makes people feel lonely in the first place is naturally the important question. Among the criticisms of linear statistical methods, the settheoretic method in general and qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in particular have developed into a challenging alternative to the statistical approach (Ragin 2000, 2008b) Whilst this relatively new approach is not a panacea—as explained later in this paper, it has limitations of its own—it is able to offer fresh insights into the causal conditions of the interested outcome. The key motivation behind this study is that the employment of settheoretic methods will help us answer some important research questions that other studies on loneliness using statistical methods cannot, for example, which among the combinations of attributes such as gender, age, living with a spouse and self-reported health is a sufficient condition for feeling lonely, so that the new insights obtained will help tackle loneliness more effectively
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