Are Older People Living Alone Socially Isolated? A Qualitative Study of Their Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses the experiences of social isolation among older people living alone. The current state of knowledge suggests that they are at a higher risk of social isolation which, in turn, can compromise their health and well-being to varying degrees. Yet, few qualitative studies have tried to understand the subjective experience of living alone and the ways it can impact older people's relationships. The data presented here are based on 43 individual interviews with men and women aged 65 to 93 living alone in the Montreal area (Canada), and group discussions with 120 actors involved in intervention. The results showed that the majority of the participating older people did not see living alone as a problem. Their stories revealed the extent of their resilience and their ability to maintain satisfactory social relations with family and peers. However, for a minority, mostly men over 80 years old, solo living translated into being alone and could become problematic. The article presents reflections for social work intervention, inviting practitioners to consider different vulnerabilities affecting the capacity of older people living alone to maintain their social networks and highlighting the importance of fostering reciprocity in their relationships.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".