Abstract
The article reports on investigation about older people's loneliness, the reasons for it, and its consequences. The detected theoretical findings triggered the authors' empirical study in Slovenia as a society in transition from the preindustrial village solidarity into the modern market individualism. In the empirical part, some aspects of the life of older people regarding their residences were compared: among older people living with their relatives, alone, with a partner, or in a retirement home, with special regard to the reasons/causes for residence, and the feeling of loneliness and contacts with relatives. The obtained empirical results showed that older people living alone or in a retirement home are feeling lonelier than those living with relatives or with a partner. They grew up in a period in which the village solidarity society was changing to the industrialized society and, in the recent 25 years, to a capitalistic individualistic market society. Their feelings may have been adapted to these crucial changes, or less so.
Highlights
I.e. social transition from the preindustrial village solidarity to the current individualistic competitive market society, wisdom or experience lost a lot of its meaning
The presented results cover an empirical study conducted on a sample of pensioners living in northeastern Slovenia
They show that, compared to old people living with their relatives or partner, those living alone or in a retirement home are in a much worse position
Summary
They respond to the pressures of each new cohort through the everyday interactions of cohort members, the millions of apparently unrelated individual decisions, the gradually emerging cohort definitions, which merge into new or altered norms, contracts, laws, social institutions. Slovenia entered the capitalistic society only 25 years ago, after many centuries of nurturing solidarity in the village society, including the one among different generations, and after stressing solidarity in the 1945-1989 period called socialism. The presented empirical research was conducted in 2013. It tested the hypothesis: Potential consequences of aging include loneliness that can have several forms, causes, and consequences
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