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Places of belonging, loneliness and lockdown

journal contribution
posted on 2023-05-21, 07:11 authored by Adrian FranklinAdrian Franklin, Bruce TranterBruce Tranter
We report new data from a survey of loneliness in Australia during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-21, in order to identify those age groups most at risk of increased loneliness. Counter-intuitively, proportionately fewer elderly Australians experienced increased loneliness as a result of lockdowns, as compared with 44% of those aged 19-29 and 31% of those aged 40-49. To explain this pattern, we investigated how lockdowns disturbed the complex connections between types of place affordance and the age-specific cultural scripts that normally give rise to a sense of belonging. For younger age groups, such scripts demand their identification with future orientations and a sense of belonging tied to the more distant and wide-ranging places of career advance, meeting, play, and pleasure that lockdown inhibited. By contrast, older retired cohorts were more inclined to frame their sense of belonging in the past through the maintenance of community connections and closer place-bonds of their locality, cultural places of memory and return that they were more happily confined to during lockdowns.

History

Publication title

Thesis Eleven

Volume

172

Pagination

150-165

ISSN

0725-5136

Department/School

School of Social Sciences

Publisher

Sage Publications

Place of publication

London

Rights statement

Copyright (2022) The Author(s).

Repository Status

  • Restricted

Socio-economic Objectives

Social structure and health

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