Loneliness in Glasgow’s deprived communities

Monday 30 March 2015

A new GoWell Briefing Paper summarises the findings from two recently published academic articles on the topic of loneliness in our study communities.  Loneliness is a topic that has received a lot of attention in the media, with the 21st century being referred to as the “age of loneliness”. 

The effect of loneliness upon people’s health has been compared with the effects of smoking and obesity.  However, most of the discussion has been about loneliness among older people, but we were interested to find out about loneliness more generally among people living in deprived areas. 

Our work examined the data collected across the fifteen GoWell study communities in mid-2011.  We found loneliness to affect two-in-five adults in our study, and to be most frequent among single adults below retirement age, and those of working age who were long-term sick and disabled.

Loneliness was associated not only with the frequency with which people had contact with their family, friends and close neighbours, but also varied according to whether people were familiar with, or had any interaction with, other people in the local neighbourhood when they were out and about in the area.  Thus, loneliness is affected not only by people’s social networks, but also by levels of conviviality in public.   Aspects of the local environment were also associated with loneliness, including the quality of the environment, the level of antisocial behaviour, and the degree of use of local amenities. 

Finally, we found strong associations between loneliness and several indicators of mental health and wellbeing.  Thus, preventing loneliness in deprived communities would be beneficial to health.  This requires both physical and social regeneration activity, and the provision and protection of social amenities in local communities, which our ecological analyses have indicated to be in decline in recent years.

Download the Briefing Paper (PDF)