Abstract
To slow the transmission of COVID-19, countries around the world have implemented social distancing and stay-at-home policies—potentially leading people to rely more on household members for their sense of closeness and belonging. To understand the conditions under which people felt the most connected, we examined whether changes in overall feelings of social connection varied by household size and composition. In two pre-registered studies, undergraduates in Canada (NStudy 1 = 548) and adults primarily from the U.S. and U.K. (NStudy 2 = 336) reported their perceived social connection once before and once during the pandemic. In both studies, living with a partner robustly and uniquely buffered shifts in social connection during the first phases of the pandemic (βStudy 1 = .22, βStudy 2 = .16). In contrast, neither household size nor other aspects of household composition predicted changes in connection. We discuss implications for future social distancing policies that aim to balance physical health with psychological health.
Highlights
On March 11, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [1] declared the COVID19 outbreak a pandemic
How can future policy guidelines balance protecting physical health through social distancing with protecting psychological health by maintaining feelings of connection? To understand the conditions under which people felt the most connected, we examined whether changes in overall feelings of social connection varied as a function of household size and composition
We found only nonsignificant trends for the impact of household size, including living alone, on social connection during COVID19, perhaps because both our studies included small samples of those living in large households and households of one
Summary
On March 11, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [1] declared the COVID19 outbreak a pandemic. By early April, COVID-19 had already spread to nearly 1.5 million people worldwide [2]. In an effort to slow down its transmission, countries around the world implemented social/physical distancing guidelines [3], compelling individuals to stay at least 6 feet (2 meters) away from anyone outside their household [4]. The WHO [2] announced that it would be moving away from the term “social distancing” and begin using “physical distancing” to more accurately describe the practice. We use “social distancing” in this paper to reflect common usage. Such non-pharmaceutical public health interventions have been long proposed to reduce the spread of infectious disease. Mathematical modeling suggests that social distancing can reduce transmission of influenza by over 90% [5], and retrospective
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