The antecedents of loneliness in older people with an intellectual disability.
Transport and emotional health are the strongest levers for reducing loneliness in older adults with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Wormald et al. (2019) asked older Irish adults with intellectual disability how lonely they felt.
They used a big government survey and ran a regression to see what predicts loneliness.
Transport trouble, poor emotional health, and functional limits came out on top.
What they found
These three factors explained about one-quarter of why some felt lonelier than others.
Hard-to-get rides mattered most, followed by mood problems and physical limits.
The model shows where services can aim help first.
How this fits with other research
Stancliffe et al. (2007) saw more loneliness in larger group homes, while D et al. link it to transport and mood. The views differ but both flag social climate: house size shapes daily contact, and bad transport cuts it off.
Titlestad et al. (2019) used the same Irish dataset and found life events hurt mental health. Pair this with D et al. and you see mood sits in the middle: life events lower mood, low mood raises loneliness.
McGonigle et al. (2014) warn that common loneliness scales misread adults with ID. D et al. used an ID-friendly measure, so their numbers are more trustworthy than earlier studies that did not.
Why it matters
You can’t fix loneliness with more bingo nights if the person has no ride home. Ask about buses, mood, and mobility first. Add transport training, counseling, or mobility aids to the care plan and you target the drivers this paper flags.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
INTRODUCTION: The cognitive discrepancy approach to loneliness is often used to describe loneliness in ageing populations, but to date, it has never been used to explore loneliness in older people with an intellectual disability. An analysis is needed utilising a refined list of causes of loneliness in this population. METHOD: Using data from a nationally representative dataset of people aged over 40 with an intellectual disability (N = 708), this analysis runs repeated regressions of variables grouped into conceptual blocks, organised from sociodemographic to network quality. RESULTS: Variables selected predicted 23% of the loneliness variance. Functional limitations, education, working in the community, transport difficulties, pain, stress caused by service change, emotional health problems and confiding were all significant predictors of loneliness. CONCLUSION: That for those with fewer functional limitations only transport difficulties precipitated loneliness, suggests living a more independent life protects from loneliness, in this group. Those with functional limitations and who lead a more service dependent life appear more exposed to loneliness precipitating variables.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2019 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2018.11.009