Spatial immobility and the dynamics of loneliness, social capital, and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.

OBJECTIVES

COVID-19 lockdowns and wider mixing restrictions severely disrupted people's lives with potentially acute implications for their mental health. This study examines how mixing restrictions affected people's loneliness and how far loneliness, in turn, can explain any impact of restrictions on psychological distress. In addition, the study explores whether local social capital (LSC) in residential communities buffered any impact of mixing restrictions on loneliness, and subsequently protected people's mental health, during the pandemic.

STUDY

DESIGN

Individuals are drawn from three waves of the nationally representative COVID-19 UK Household Longitudinal Study (n = 24,481 person-observations). To measure the impact of social mixing restrictions, respondents are matched with daily community-level (Local Authority) spatial immobility data from Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports.

METHODS

Fixed-effects longitudinal modelling is applied to address time invariant unobserved heterogeneity in estimates of the associations between spatial immobility, loneliness and psychological distress.

RESULTS

Increasing spatial immobility is associated with increasing loneliness, which is linked with greater psychological distress. However, LSC moderates these associations. Spatial immobility has a weaker positive association with loneliness among individuals with higher LSC. It also has a weaker positive association with distress among higher-LSC individuals. LSC moderates the relationship between spatial immobility and psychological distress because individuals with higher LSC report less loneliness under conditions of increasing spatial immobility.

CONCLUSION

Spatial immobility increased loneliness, in turn, harming mental health. However, LSC protected individuals' mental health due to its buffering-effect against loneliness. Investing in communities to foster LSC is thus important for crisis-preparedness to minimise the harm of national crises on mental health.