How socially connected are people feeling?

Photo by Gabriel Benois on Unsplash

It’s been three weeks since we launched the Love in the Time of COVID research project. Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, we plan to share findings with the public as quickly as possible. This blog will be one of the first places that we share those findings.

The analyses presented below were conducted on April 9, 2020 (data collected March 27-April 9). As of April 9, 2,060 people had completed our survey. Since our translations of the survey have started coming online, we now have roughly double that number of respondents in the study.

Here is where those 2,060 people come from (at the town level, map courtesy of UGA demographer Jeffrey Wright):

https://heffaywrit.carto.com/viz/9c9b3802-18f5-42c6-b1ee-2cfef4aced8d/public_map 

As you can see, we have pretty good global representation, though our sample is over-represented by participants from the U.S. and Europe. It will be great to get more participants from Africa, Asia, South America and Oceania as more translations of the survey come online (the survey is currently available in 9 languages).

So our first big question is: How connected are people feeling with others right now?

Roughly 25% of people are actually reporting feeling more connected than usual. This is pretty interesting. I think that this is probably a function, for some, of 1) feeling like the whole world is in this together, and 2) because a lot of people are using Zoom and other video chat software to connect to people they haven't talked to in a long time. My wife, for example, hasn't talked to some of her cousins in years. Now she and her four sisters and their three cousins and both of their moms are Zooming every other week.

However, troubling effects are seen on the left side of the graph. More than 50% of respondents felt less connected with others over the past two weeks.

We will no doubt see haves and have-nots, socially, over the course of the pandemic. A reasonable prediction is that many of the haves will be in living situations with others that were already good to begin with (good relationships with spouse, kids, roommates, etc.).

Among those who are in romantic relationships that are already high in conflict, boring, or dissatisfying in other ways, I think they will end up being pretty unhappy (more than they already are in their relationships). We've heard that the divorce rates in China have gone up the last several weeks. If this effect bears out with more data, I think the effect is a function—at least in part—of those in dysfunctional relationships having to spend a lot of time in the middle of that dysfunction. In contrast, among those in good relationships at home, and among those who are fortunate enough to be able to work from home, I think we will see many feel more connected.

What do the data say so far? Let’s look at those couples on the higher end of relationship satisfaction (score of 6 or 7) compared to those who score a 5 or below on a 7-point relationship satisfaction measure.

Do people who are less satisfied in their relationships feel more or less connected to their partner since the pandemic began? We see a fairly normal distribution in their answers

A great many of them are feeling depressed. Generally (i.e., in non-COVID times) we see strong links between marital dissatisfaction and depression, but still, this graph below is pretty striking.

What about those in happy relationships, in terms of how connected they have felt to their partner since the pandemic began?

Whoa!

Nearly 50% feel more connected to their romantic partner since the pandemic began. This reminds me of Eli Finkel’s All-or-Nothing Marriage idea, in which the really best relationships thrive, given the right circumstances. Having a lot of time cooped up together may be giving happy couples more oxygen, to use Finkel’s analogy, and may feel closer than ever during the pandemic. It will be very interesting to see if this effect changes over time.

Let’s get back to how people in our sample are generally connecting with other people while in isolation. As you can see from the graph below, roughly 85% of the whole sample are connecting with friends on video chat to at least some extent. Over 35% talk to friends through video most days or every day. That the majority of people in our sample are virtually connecting with others is good news. 

We see a similar pattern when we look at spending time virtually with family:

An important caveat: We are not capturing in our sample those who do not have access to the internet. The social challenges facing those who cannot connect virtually with others, especially for those who live alone, will be high.

I’m curious to find out if we will see a Zoom fatigue effect if social distancing goes on for several weeks (or months). In a recent paper, David Sbarra, Julia Briskin and I argue that people are evolutionarily hard-wired to really connect with people in small groups of 2-4 rather than big ones.

I predict that when people use Zoom to talk to just 1-2 other people at once, they will feel more connected than those using it in larger groups. Larger Zoom calls are like a seminar in which only one person can talk at once. It's just not how people normally talk at social gatherings. With 1-2 other people, a video chat much more closely approximates an in-person interaction. We plan to ask respondents in our study about Zoom fatigue in the weeks to come.

One of the important things to look at as we go forward is whether the pandemic is hitting people who are living by themselves much harder than those who are living with others (spouse, family, roommates, etc.). In our sample, 16.4% live alone while 83.6% live with others. 28.9% of those living alone report feeling quite a bit or extremely lonely. In comparison, 21.1% of those living with others feeling quite a bit or extremely lonely. This is a non-trivial difference in loneliness.

Given the effects of loneliness on morbidity and mortality (see Julianne Holt-Lunstad’s important meta-analysis on the topic), these are numbers we will want to watch closely over the next several weeks.