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Causal conditions for loneliness: a set-theoretic analysis on an adult sample in the UK

Yang, K.

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Abstract

While age has been identified as a risk factor for loneliness, whether it is a necessary or sufficient condition for loneliness has never been examined. This is the first study that applies fuzzy-set QCA, a special type of set-theoretic method, to discover the necessary and sufficient causal conditions for loneliness, respectively, among adults in the UK, analysing the data collected from the UK sample of Round 6 of the European Social Survey (ESS, 2012, n = 2163). It firstly examines the configurations of five conditions: being female, old age, not living with spouse/partner, bad health, and not being frequently social with others. Gender was found neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for loneliness, and old age was close to being a necessary condition and became necessary when united with any of the other conditions; the configuration of not living with spouse/partner and not healthy and not frequently social with others is a sufficient condition. Robustness of results was tested with two different conditions (a limiting illness and a confidante), and a separate analysis on the absence of loneliness was conducted. The effect of the unbalanced distribution of cases across different values of the outcome was highlighted as a source of uncertainty, and the results on the absence of loneliness are different from those on its presence.

Citation

Yang, K. (2018). Causal conditions for loneliness: a set-theoretic analysis on an adult sample in the UK. Quality and Quantity, 52(2), 685-701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0482-y

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Feb 13, 2017
Online Publication Date Feb 13, 2017
Publication Date Mar 1, 2018
Deposit Date Feb 14, 2017
Publicly Available Date Feb 14, 2017
Journal Quality and Quantity
Print ISSN 0033-5177
Electronic ISSN 1573-7845
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 52
Issue 2
Pages 685-701
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0482-y

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2017 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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