Association of Pickleball Participation With Decreased Perceived Loneliness and Social Isolation: Results of a National Survey
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION/OBJECTIVES: One in four older adults in the United States (US) reports being socially isolated or lonely, leading to increases in the odds of having heart disease, a stroke, and dementia. Physical activity (PA) has many benefits in this population, both physical and psychological. One such type of PA growing in popularity is pickleball. Our objective was to understand the relationship of pickleball participation with perceived loneliness and social isolation among older adults in the US. METHODS: We conducted a national cross-sectional survey of 825 US adults over age 50 years. We compared the effect of 3 levels of pickleball play history (never played (NP); played previously, not currently (PP); and currently play (CP)) on loneliness and social isolation. RESULTS: Most participants (65%) who had ever played pickleball were still currently playing. Over half of the sample (57%) reported being lonely. The adjusted odds of being lonely were greater for NP (adjusted odds ratio 95% CI = 1.53, 1.04-2.23), and PP (1.95, 1.24-3.05) groups. Compared to NP, PP, and CP groups were found to be associated with having made more social connections and reporting a greater number of social engagements, thus appearing to experience less social isolation. CONCLUSION: Older adults who participate in pickleball had an associated decreased perceived loneliness and reduced risk of social isolation. Further research is needed to determine if recommendations for those able to physically participate in pickleball might result in similar changes to loneliness and social isolation.
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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 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 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".