Social contact and inequalities in depressive symptoms and loneliness among older adults: A mediation analysis of the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing

Background: Social contact, including remote contact (by telephone, email, letter or text), could help reduce social inequalities in depressive symptoms and loneliness among older adults. Methods: Data were from the 8th wave of the English Longitudinal Study of Aging (2016/17), stratified by age (n=1,578 aged <65; n=4,026 aged 65+). Inverse probability weighting was used to estimate average effects of weekly in-person and remote social contact on depressive symptoms (score of 3+ on 8-item CES-D scale) and two measures of loneliness (sometimes/often feels lonely vs hardly ever/never; and top quintile of UCLA loneliness scale vs all others). We also estimated controlled direct effects of education, partner status, and wealth on loneliness and depressive symptoms under two scenarios: 1) universal infrequent (

Keywords:

• Longitudinal study
• Loneliness
• Mediation (statistics)
• depressive symptoms
• Social inequality
• Ageing
• Inequality
• Odds
• Clinical psychology
• Psychology

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