Press release: "Gender differences in loneliness across the lifespan: A meta-analysis"
Dr. Marlies Maes and her colleagues have recently published the article, “Gender differences in loneliness across the lifespan: A meta-analysis” in the European Journal of Personality. In this paper, they examined the scientific literature focused on whether gender differences in loneliness exist and their patterns across the lifespan. The results of their meta-analysis suggest that men and women exhibit similar levels of loneliness across the lifespan. The study was published in the November/December 2019 issue of the European Journal of Personality.
To investigate their research question, Dr. Maes and colleagues performed a multilevel meta-analysis, a statistical technique that summarizes effects across a set of different research studies that can account for the dependency of the effect sizes. For instance, sometimes one single study may test different relevant paths or the same path in different samples, thus resulting in multiple effect sizes that are subject to the same study characteristics. In total, 638 studies (in 575 papers) were included in the meta-analysis, resulting in a total sample size of 399,798 individuals and 751 effects. Gender was then examined as a possible factor that influenced mean levels of loneliness. The results indicated that males were slightly more lonely than females in childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood, but not in other stages of the lifespan. However, the gender differences were small (g = .07, similar to Cohen’s d), suggesting that these differences are quite limited. Moreover, these differences were not present when restricting the meta-analysis to studies with sample sizes that included at least 100 males and 100 females. In sum, the findings from this meta-analysis suggest that when it comes to loneliness, males and females may be more alike than they are different.
Correspondence about this study may be addressed to the first author, Dr. Marlies Maes, School of Psychology and Development in Context, KU Leuven, Belgium. Dr. Maes can be contacted via email on marlies.maes@kuleuven.be.