Bianca Suanet

Unemployment is consistently associated with decreased well-being, but other productive roles may partly compensate for the social and psychological resources lost through job loss. Using a mega-analysis on six longitudinal panel studies covering over 500,000 observations across 20 European countries, we examine how age and volunteer status moderate associations between unemployment and life satisfaction. First-difference models show that transitions into unemployment are associated with declines in life satisfaction, with stronger negative effects observed among younger and middle-aged adults than among older adults. Contrary to expectations, volunteering does not consistently buffer the negative association between unemployment and life satisfaction, although supplementary analyses indicate that the compensatory role of volunteering may vary across age groups and national contexts. These findings indicate that volunteering is not a universal substitute for paid work and that the capacity of alternative productive roles to maintain well-being following job loss depends on broader social and institutional conditions.

Loneliness is often seen as a personal issue but is deeply influenced by broader societal factors. This chapter critiques the “microfication” of loneliness studies, which focus predominantly on individual-level factors, and advocates for a focus on macro-level influences. Using Coleman’s boat model, we explore how societal structures, cultural values, and individual experiences of loneliness interact. The “loneliness paradox,” where loneliness is lower in individualistic societies like Northern Europe than in more collectivist societies such as Southern Europe, underscores the need to contextualize loneliness within cultural and structural conditions. We argue that welfare systems, resource distribution, and cultural norms play a significant role in shaping loneliness, challenging the narrative that individualization and digitalization are the primary drivers of social disconnection. This chapter calls for a shift toward viewing loneliness as a societal issue, requiring systemic explanations and interventions rather than focusing on individualistic solutions. It also addresses methodological gaps, proposing advancements like cross-national comparative designs, intersectional frameworks, and context-sensitive measures of loneliness. These innovations aim to uncover the complex dynamics between macro- and micro-level factors. By reframing loneliness through a macro lens, this chapter provides a foundation for both theoretical refinement and practical policy solutions to address loneliness as a structural phenomenon.

This chapter proposes a sociological theory for loneliness, which has primarily been studied at the individual level. The authors draw on sociological theories, life course theories, and a simplified socio-ecological model to introduce five key axioms that explain how loneliness evolves over the life course. These axioms emphasize the role of human agency, early life conditions and experiences, the timing of life events, linked lives, various forms of capital, and broader community and societal contexts. Through this lens, loneliness is not just an individual feature but also a feature of social structure, shaped by a complex interplay of personal characteristics and influences at multiple levels. The chapter highlights how the immediate environment and larger societal structures can both directly and indirectly affect the loneliness trajectory. Applying a sociological perspective to loneliness research enhances our understanding of the contextual factors that influence loneliness across time and space, supports the examination of interactions between micro (individual), meso (community), and macro (societal) levels, and provides a framework for designing interventions that target societal and community factors, rather than focusing solely on individual solutions. This approach offers a comprehensive understanding of loneliness that is informative for more effective, systemic strategies for prevention and reduction.

To check claims of a "loneliness epidemic," we examined whether current cohorts of older adults report higher levels and/or steeper age-related increases in loneliness than earlier-born peers. Specifically, we used 1,068 age-matched longitudinal reports (M_{age observations} = 79 years, 49% women) of loneliness provided by independent samples recruited in the German city of Berlin in 1990 and 2010, n = 257 participants in the Berlin Aging Study (BASE) and n = 383 participants in Berlin Aging Study II (BASE-II). Using multilevel models that orthogonalize between-person and within-person age effects, we examined how responses to items from the UCLA Loneliness Scale provided by observation-matched cohorts differed with age and across cohorts, and if those differences might be explained by a variety of individual factors. Results revealed that at age 79, the later-born BASE-II cohort reported substantially lower levels of loneliness than the earlier-born BASE cohort (d = -0.84), with cohort differences accounting for more than 14% of the variance in loneliness. Age trajectories, however, were parallel without evidence of cohort differences in rates of within-person age-related changes in loneliness. Differences in gender, education, cognitive functioning, and external control beliefs accounted for the lion's share of cohort-related differences in levels of loneliness. Results show that loneliness among older adults has shifted to markedly lower levels today, but the rate at which loneliness increases with age proceeds similarly as 2 decades ago. Future studies should investigate how psychosocial functioning across the life course is progressing in different sociohistorical contexts and in other age groups, such as younger and middle-aged adults. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Many forms of prosocial behaviour are highly institutionalized. They are facilitated by organizations that broker between donors and recipients. A highly effective tool that organizations use to elicit prosocial behaviour are solicitations for donations (e.g., of blood, time, or money). Using register and survey data on blood donations in the Netherlands, we examine to what extent compliance with these solicitations is predicted by being recruited via word of mouth (WOM) and talking about donations. Our model predicts that donors that are one unit higher on our measure of talking about donations (range = 1-4) have a 2.9 percentage points higher compliance with solicitations for donations. In addition, this association is stronger for novice donors. Our study demonstrates the social embedding of the donors’ decision-making processes about compliance. For practice, our results imply that organizations may increase their contributors’ communication about donations to increase the effectiveness of their solicitations.

Societal change related to individualisation has likely made individual resources more important for the maintenance of social ties. This raises the question whether lower-educated adults are more disadvantaged in later-born cohorts in personal network structure and function. Observations are from 4,886 individuals aged 55 and over from the Longitudinal Aging Study Amsterdam (LASA), who are followed over a timespan of a maximum of 24 years between 1992 and 2016. Multi-level regression models are estimated to determine cohort differences. Network size is larger in later-born cohorts, and more so for the higher-educated than for the lower-educated adults. Network diversity increases across birth cohorts irrespective of educational level. Lower- and higher-educated women, and lower-educated men give more instrumental support in later-born cohorts, whereas higher-educated men do not show such a steep increase. More emotional and instrumental support is also received in later-born cohorts irrespective of educational level, but higher-educated adults receive more emotional support in all birth cohorts. Thus, lower-educated older adults are not necessarily worse off socially in later-born cohorts. Instead, they are even more likely to be active givers of support. Also, most of the gains in personal networks of older adults in later-born cohorts are independent of educational level, suggesting that the social landscape for older adults today is much richer.