Years after the U.S. began to slowly emerge from mandatory COVID-19 lockdowns, more than half of older adults still spend more time at home and less time socializing in public spaces than they did pre-pandemic, according to new CU Boulder research.
Participants cited fear of infection and “more uncomfortable and hostile” social dynamics as key reasons for their retreat from civic life.
“The pandemic is not over for a lot of folks,” said Jessica Finlay, an assistant professor of geography whose findings are revealed in a series of new papers. “Some people feel left behind.”
The study comes amid what the U.S. Surgeon General recently called an “epidemic of loneliness” in which older adults—especially those who are immune compromised or have disabilities—are particularly vulnerable.
It’s such a tragedy that we humans are surrounded by so many people yet have to endure such isolation. Just a few years ago I was practically completely isolated. I feel very fortunate to have sprouted and made a community. To have continued down that path of loneliness would have been incredibly hard.
7000 doesn’t sound like a large enough sample size to get accurate results.
You’re just plain wrong. A sample of 7,000 against the whole US adult population only provides a margin of error of just over 1%. Hell, you need the representative sample to drop to 350 panel members to get the MOE up to 5%. If you’re going to post comments about experimental design, maybe understand basic statistics and statistical modeling before type something dumb.
What would sound large enough to you?
Tens of thousands.
Why so many?
The age of the American population 55+ is over 80,000,000 so 0.0000875% of that population seems small to be drawing conclusions from.
That’s not how statistics works. If that were true, you could never test dice for fairness because there are theoretically an infinite number of rolls that could happen
Well I don’t generate statistics normally and we’re not dealing with something as reliable as dice roles. I stated the sample size “sounds” small and got downvoted into a pit. I’m going to remain skeptical about this research.
