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Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions

The aim of this paper is to study the association between childhood circumstances and loneliness in older adults in Europe. Based on rich information collected by the Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on childhood characteristics and individual characteristics at age 50+, th...

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Autor principal: Guthmuller, Sophie
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Public Library of Science 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9116676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35584108
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267562
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author Guthmuller, Sophie
author_facet Guthmuller, Sophie
author_sort Guthmuller, Sophie
collection PubMed
description The aim of this paper is to study the association between childhood circumstances and loneliness in older adults in Europe. Based on rich information collected by the Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on childhood characteristics and individual characteristics at age 50+, the study is able to control for personality traits, socioeconomic and demographic factors, social support and health in later life, and country-specific characteristics. The analyses show strong correlations between life circumstances in childhood and feeling lonely in older age; these correlations remain significant after adjusting for covariates. While ill health is the main factor correlated with loneliness at 50+, as expected, the analysis of the relative importance of the determinants reveals that personality traits account for more than 10% of the explained variance and that life circumstances during childhood account for 7%. Social support at older ages is the second highest category of factors, accounting for 27%—with, interestingly, support at home and social network characteristics contributing about 10% each, engaging in activities and computer skills accounting for 7% of the explained variance. Demographic and socioeconomic factors account for 6% and country-level characteristics contribute 5%. This paper points out the relevance of early life interventions to tackling loneliness in older age, and it shows that early interventions and interventions aiming at increasing social support in later life need to be adapted to all personality types. Thus, the role of childhood circumstances and the mechanisms explaining the association between loneliness in childhood and loneliness in later life deserve more attention in future research.
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spelling pubmed-91166762022-05-19 Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions Guthmuller, Sophie PLoS One Research Article The aim of this paper is to study the association between childhood circumstances and loneliness in older adults in Europe. Based on rich information collected by the Survey on Health, Ageing, and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) on childhood characteristics and individual characteristics at age 50+, the study is able to control for personality traits, socioeconomic and demographic factors, social support and health in later life, and country-specific characteristics. The analyses show strong correlations between life circumstances in childhood and feeling lonely in older age; these correlations remain significant after adjusting for covariates. While ill health is the main factor correlated with loneliness at 50+, as expected, the analysis of the relative importance of the determinants reveals that personality traits account for more than 10% of the explained variance and that life circumstances during childhood account for 7%. Social support at older ages is the second highest category of factors, accounting for 27%—with, interestingly, support at home and social network characteristics contributing about 10% each, engaging in activities and computer skills accounting for 7% of the explained variance. Demographic and socioeconomic factors account for 6% and country-level characteristics contribute 5%. This paper points out the relevance of early life interventions to tackling loneliness in older age, and it shows that early interventions and interventions aiming at increasing social support in later life need to be adapted to all personality types. Thus, the role of childhood circumstances and the mechanisms explaining the association between loneliness in childhood and loneliness in later life deserve more attention in future research. Public Library of Science 2022-05-18 /pmc/articles/PMC9116676/ /pubmed/35584108 http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267562 Text en © 2022 Sophie Guthmuller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Guthmuller, Sophie
Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title_full Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title_fullStr Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title_full_unstemmed Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title_short Loneliness among older adults in Europe: The relative importance of early and later life conditions
title_sort loneliness among older adults in europe: the relative importance of early and later life conditions
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9116676/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35584108
http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267562
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