Social isolation: A conceptual and measurement proposal

By Diego Zavaleta, K. Samuel, C. Mills. 2014

127 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social isolation is a deprivation of social connectedness. It is a crucial aspect that continues to be named by people as a core impediment for achieving well-being and as a relevant factor for understanding poverty. The notion of social isolation has been discussed within a diversity of theories that have provided rich insights into particular aspects of social isolation. However, there is no agreement on the core components of this social malady or on how to measure it. Although the challenge of conceptualising and measuring social connectedness is daunting, this paper argues that existing research in several fields provides solid ground for a common concept and for the construction of basic internationally comparable indicators that measure specific aspects of social isolation. In particular, this paper aims to contribute to the debate on social connectedness and its measurement in three ways: (1) presenting a working definition that, while doing justice to the rich insights advanced by different theories, stresses relational features in the life experience of people; (2) emphasising the relevance of isolation for poverty analysis; and (3) proposing some indicators to measure social connectedness that could be feasibly incorporated into a multi-topic household survey.

Subfields: Health, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/22a649f4e66e94a355424595ac6467b7180e11ea

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Health

1. Josep Maria Haro
2. Anastas Philalithis
3. A. Papadaki
4. M. Linardakis
5. Maria Vozikaki

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Anastas Philalithis
2. A. Papadaki
3. M. Linardakis
4. Maria Vozikaki

Citations in the corpus

• The association between social relationships and depression: a systematic review. (2015, background): “Zhang and Li (2011) [crosssectional moderate] reported that widows either had or perceived themselves as having less emotional support from the family than the married elderly, and this lower level of support predicted higher levels of depression.”
• Loneliness among older European adults: results from the survey of health, aging and retirement in Europe (2018, background): “…which facilitates a “loneliness-provoking factor” assumed to be mostly prevalent among older individuals living alone in these countries, whereby co-residence or nearness of parents to their offspring is highly appreciated as a core aspect of intergenerational solidarity (Zavaleta et al. 2014).”