The association of pre-COVID-19 social isolation and functional social support with loneliness during COVID-19: a longitudinal analysis of the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: We evaluated the association between two measures of social connection prior to COVID-19-social isolation and functional social support-and loneliness during the pandemic. METHOD: The study was a retrospective longitudinal analysis of 20,129 middle-aged and older adults enrolled in the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging (CLSA). We drew upon two waves of CLSA data spanning three years and the supplemental COVID-19 Questionnaire Study of eight months to conduct our analysis. RESULTS: Social isolation prior to COVID-19 was associated with loneliness during COVID-19 only among persons who were lonely before the pandemic (adjusted odds ratio [aOR]: 1.17; 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.02, 1.35). Higher functional social support prior to COVID-19 was inversely associated with loneliness during the pandemic, when adjusting for pre-COVID-19 loneliness (aOR: 0.37; 95%CI: 0.34, 0.41) and when assessing incident loneliness during the pandemic (adjusted relative risk: 0.59; 95% CI: 0.55, 0.63). CONCLUSION: Policies are needed to identify people who are both socially isolated and lonely, and provide them with functional social support, to prevent worsening loneliness during public health crises.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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".