Health, Structural or Functional Aspects of Social Connection: What Mediates the Relationship Between Socioeconomic Status and Loneliness? The case of income

Details

Supervisors

Lorant, Vincent

Faculty

Faculté de santé publique

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de la santé publique, à finalité spécialisée

Abstract

enContext : Many factors have been associated with loneliness in the literature. Among these, we find several indicators of socioeconomic status. Existing theoretical frameworks have suggested that the relationship between socioeconomic status and loneliness may operate through more proximal factors, namely health and social connection, that more directly impact loneliness (De Jong Gierveld & Tesch-Römer, 2012; Hawkley et al., 2008). Few studies appear to truly examine this hypothesized mechanism, and even less so through formal mediation analysis. In this thesis, we thus aimed to more thoroughly explore what may mediate the relationship between socioeconomic status and loneliness. Methods : We ran multiple path analyses using cross-sectional data from the European Union Loneliness Survey 2022 (N= 25,646). We used income decile as our measure of socioeconomic status and studied three potential groups of mediators through which the relationship between income decile and loneliness may play out: health, structural and functional social connection. We first ran three mediation models focusing on each group. In a final mediation model, we compared the most influential mediators from the previous models. Results : We found subjective health, social support and number of friends to be the strongest mediators in terms of health, functional and structural aspects of social connection respectively. In our final model, these three nearly fully mediated the relationship between income decile and loneliness, with the direct effect of income decile on loneliness becoming insignificant. Indirect effects through subjective health and social support were significantly larger than the indirect effect of income decile on loneliness through number of friends. Conclusions : Our findings suggest subjective health and social support may be relevant targets for intervention, and even more so for the more socioeconomically disadvantaged. Future research should expand to longitudinal studies in order to confirm these cross-sectional findings.