S
OCIAL
I
SOLATION AND
H
EALTH
A
MONG
O
LDER
A
DULTS
:
A
SSESSING THE
C
ONTRIBUTIONS OF
O
BJECTIVE AND
S
UBJECTIVE
I
SOLATION
Previous research indicates that social isolation negatively affects both physical and mental health,
particularly among older adults (House 2001; House 2002; Tomaka, Thompson, and Palacios 2006). The
effects of social isolation have been compared in magnitude to the damaging health effects of smoking
cigarettes and other major health risks (House 2001). However, conceptualizations of social isolation vary
widely. Most research on social isolation relies on a few indicators, such as living alone, perceived social
support, or loneliness. This research cannot assess how constellations of factors, such as household size,
social network characteristics, participation in social and group activities, perceived social support, and
feelings of loneliness, might align to create situations of social isolation.
A review of previous work on social isolation indicates that researchers think that social isolation
can manifest in two forms: physical separation from others and feelings of loneliness or not belonging.
Isolation defined by objective, physical separation from other people might be indicated by a lack of
social ties and infrequent involvement in social activities. Other research, however, focuses on subjective
factors, such as feelings of loneliness, emotional closeness, and perceived social support. While each of
these concepts capture the idea of isolation, we do not know their unique effects on physical and mental
health or, more importantly, which forms of isolation are most damaging to health.
We demonstrate how these two types of social isolation – objective social isolation and subjective
social isolation—can be operationalized in the form of reliable scales. We use new data from the National
Social Life, Health, and Aging Project (NSHAP), a national population-based study of community-
residing older adults. The breadth of data collected in this study allows us to consider a wide variety of
indicators of social isolation, including living alone, social network size and range, frequency of
interaction, participation in social activities, feelings of loneliness and not belonging, emotional closeness
with network members, and perceived social support from family and friends. We use the scales of
objective and subjective isolation to examine the relationships between these two types of isolation and
1
Convention