[mandmandam]

I had a hunch going in that the authors would fail to break down how much more lonely the poor have been compared to the wealthy.

Sadly, I was correct. They really didn't mention wealth or inequality once.

Class pervades every aspect of America's problems so deeply that it's almost invisible, but that is no excuse to ignore it. Especially when we're talking about Harvard research, and especially when we're talking about a pandemic that has dramatically exacerbated wealth inequality while extremely disproportionately affecting the poor and minorities.

[anotherman554]

Poor people are often forced to have roommates, live with their parents, or otherwise maintain relationships for economic reasons. I wouldn't expect poor people to necessarily be more lonely.

[mandmandam]

Ah yes, nothing like being forced to live with strangers and parents to solve loneliness. Seriously?

If you care to look, there is actually a lot of research pointing that the pandemic affected the poor's ability to voluntarily socialize compared to the wealthy. If you think about it, it's incredibly obvious.

And yet these authors didn't mention the idea once. That's unconscionable, if unsurprising.

[anotherman554]

Roommates are not necessarily strangers. If you are arguing living with parents doesn't decrease loneliness over living alone... I'm going to argue that's a non intuitive argument. That doesn't mean you are wrong necessarily but it does mean I'm probably going to question it.

As far as I can tell this hasn't really been studied, at least this paper from 2019 on loneliness says "There is virtually no literature that looks at socioeconomic status as the independent variable."

https://soundideas.pugetsound.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

It does appear to be an issue with older adults I suppose:

https://www.healio.com/news/psychiatry/20210324/socioeconomi...

[mandmandam]

I'll say this again - it's completely absurd to ignore the issue of class / wealth inequality when considering access to social situations that decrease loneliness.

And it's dumb beyond words to write a fucking Harvard paper on loneliness and not mention wealth inequality once.

I don't believe these statements need to be backed up by science to be self-evident, and worthy of research. That's a tautology, and a dumb one.

[CMay]

I'd strongly question having confidence in the wide applicability of the results in respect to class or wealth, much less loneliness which one would guess skews higher than a random sample due to their data source being Mechanical Turk.

Both this paper and another paper it links to make it a point to state possible concern with getting their data this way. Aside from that, there are several important factors you would want to account for and the more you want to split out the data to isolate influences the larger the sample size you need. Their total sample size was only ~950, making each nested subset sample size progressively smaller than that.