COVID-19 and social distancing: pandemic has altered social relationships and contacts in older adults over 4 years

Abstract

Introduction: Social isolation is a main risk factor for loneliness, health issues and psychological diseases. With its restriction measures, the coronavirus pandemic has led to an objective reduction in meaningful interactions, communication, and social contacts in general (social isolation). However, it has been shown that older adults cope differently with social isolation. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate the changes of social contacts of older adults over the pandemic period of 4 years.

Methods: For this purpose, N = 175 older adults (M _age = 72.60, SD _age = 6.12 years, Mdn _age = 72, Range: 60-87 years) were asked at 3 time points (2019, 2021, 2023) with how many people they had contact in the reference month (May, November). In addition to the number of contacts, participants were also asked about the type of the relationship (e.g., family, friends, neighbors), the type of contact (e.g., telephone, video conference and/or by written messages) and the emotional closeness (close, medium, low). We used an ego-centered "social network" circle to measure social contacts of older adults before, during and after the pandemic. The data collection was limited by the changing corona restrictions.

Results: Results indicate that behavior in social contacts essentially depends on age, gender, and level of depression. We found a clear temporal drop in social contacts independently of age and gender during the pandemic. After the pandemic close contacts did not recover to prepandemic level. Especially, Young-Old (<72 years) recovered less in terms of the number of social contacts than the Old-Old (≥72 years).

Discussion: Our study, thus, provides longitudinal insights into the course of social contacts and suggests that social isolation may have more negative and long-term impact on close contacts, which need further clarification and temporal extension.

Keywords: COVID-19; loneliness; older adults; social contact; social networks.

Figure 1

Social network circle for measuring the (1) type of relationship, (2) type of contact, and (3) emotional closeness. (Top) Blank scheme for the social network that is given to the participants to enter their contacts, here for the reference month of May 2021. (Bottom) Example of a completed scheme of a participant who indicated a total of 8 contact persons (A to H). Of these, two contacts are close contacts (A and B), two are medium contacts (C and F) and four are low contacts (D, E, G, and H). Furthermore, contact with two persons took place at the participant's own home, with three persons there was contact via written messages, there was telephone contact with three persons and one person was met outside or at a location outside the participant's own home. Using information that the investigator noted down on an additional list during the data collection (see Supplementary material), it is also possible to calculate how many of the contact persons A to H belong to the participant's family, are friends/acquaintances, neighbors, (former) work colleagues, professional helpers or social contacts in the context of voluntary work or leisure activities.

Figure 2

Overview over the number of social contacts for participants differing in their level of depression level (with and without) and gender. (Top) Participants without depression (n_{no_depression} = 158), (Bottom) participants with depression (n_depression = 37) over the three time points.