The Lonely States Of America: A Sociology That Should Scare You
June 23, 2006 -- A recent study has found that, on average, most American adults only have two people they can talk to about the most important subjects in their lives—serious health problems, for example, or issues like who will care for their children should they die. And about one-quarter have no close confidants at all. The study's authors, Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin and Matthew Brashears, are sociologists at Duke and the University of Arizona. Their unpleasant but long-suspected discovery is that social isolation in America has grown dramatically in the past 20 years.
The authors set out to empirically describe how socially connected Americans are by asking them questions like, "Who are the people with whom you discussed matters important to you?" They did this as part of the General Social Survey, the Rolls Royce of face-to-face social surveys that has been conducted almost every year since 1972. In 2004, they precisely replicated questions about social networks that had not been asked since 1985.
--From 1985 to 2004, "the number of people saying there is no one with whom they discuss important matters nearly tripled." Now, 24.6% report they have no confidants, family or non-family—that's 1 in 4 Americans. Another 19.6% say they have just one confidant.
--In 1985, 80% had at least one confidant who was not family; now only 57.2% do.
--The average size of Americans' social networks decreased by a third between 1985 and 2004, from 2.94 to 2.08.
--The kinds of relationships that decreased the most in providing important contacts were neighbors and co-members of groups or voluntary associations (as opposed to spouse, sibling, parent, co-worker, etc.)
--Women have more family in their networks than men, as they did in 1985. But then they had fewer non-kin close relationships than men did. Now women have about the same number of confidants outside family as do men. Unfortunately, that isn't because women have made more contacts outside kin, but because men have fewer.
--More education correlates with having larger social networks. Non-whites and the elderly are populations with smaller networks.
"The number of people who have someone to talk to about matters that are important to them has declined dramatically," Smith-Lovin said. "We've gone from a quarter of the American population being isolated to almost half the population falling into that category. And the kinds of connections we studied are the kinds of people you call on for social support, for real concrete help when you need it. These are the tightest inner circle." Having only one confidant, even if that confidant is a spouse, leaves a person extremely vulnerable if the spouse dies or the marriage disintegrates, she said.
The authors were surprised at the findings and looked for every possible reason why the results could be wrong. They explored whether people have different notions of the word "discuss" or "important" than they did 20 years ago. They looked for technical problems in the survey. But the news stayed bad.
So what explains this seismic social thud?
The paper eliminates a couple suspects. It is not caused by great geographic mobility—the corporate nomad syndrome. It is not caused by employment rates. It does not correlate with increased television watching. Most importantly, it is not caused by the demographic facts that the population is aging and more ethnically diverse; if it were, those trends would have been countered by the increased educational levels since 1985, since education leads to larger networks. That means the answers will be...complicated.
Though they are mostly into documenting, not explaining, the authors do put out a couple of hypotheses, citing, especially, work time and commutes. Both have increased since 1985 and both take time away from families, friends and voluntary participation. As women entered the workforce in bulk, the total number of hours family members spent working outside the home went way up. As people fled the cities, suburbs and exurbs boomed and so did commute times. This especially affects "middle-aged, better-educated, higher-income families." As the paper points out, these are exactly the people who build neighborhoods and volunteer groups and those are the social structures that have most atrophied in the past 20 years.
The more speculative hypothesis is that perhaps new communications technologies have led to people forming wider, but weaker social ties that are less dependent on geography. Six years ago, the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society reported that Internet use was causing social isolation. "The more hours people use the Internet, the less time they spend in contact with real human beings," according to the institute. On the other hand, E-mail and cheap phone calls have made it easier to stay in frequent, sometimes constant touch with lots of people, no matter where they are. These weak ties are different than the confidant ties that this study measures, but the authors are open to the idea that a network of weaker ties can provide equally meaningful, if different, social support. But they also point out the obvious: "some services and emotional support" do depend on proximity. "E-mailing somebody far away is not the same as them going to pick up your child at daycare or bringing you chicken soup," Smith-Lovin said.
Recent social science research about the decline of civic engagement and community participation has been exceedingly controversial and contested. David Riesman's 1950 book, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character described the alienating conformity of the new post-war workplace as craftsmen were replaced by organization men. Harvard professor Robert Putnam's 2000 book Bowling Alone found that since the '60s, membership has plummeted in PTAs, unions, clubs and, in accordance with his title, bowling leagues. Putnam also reported long-term declines in civic participation, including charity and blood donations and drops as sharp as 60% in dinner parties, civic meetings, family suppers and picnics. As connections to neighbors and social clubs decline, Smith-Lovin said, "from a social point of view it means you've got more people isolated in a small network of people who are just like them."
Really? On my monitor it makes it easier to read, but then my astigmatism is pretty terrible. OK, I'll remove most of it.
Most of what so many kids know these days about communication is entirely through technology. On the other hand if they can't talk to their parents maybe they can find confidants online where otherwise they might have none or precious few. How real are those confidants? I remember the good old pre-cell phone days too, good times .
