Living alone, feeling connected: television engagement, loneliness, and social isolation among elderly women.

BACKGROUND

Rapidly changing family and migration contexts have made loneliness among older women in single-person households a key psychosocial issue. The literature has focused on loneliness as a lack of social interaction and isolation, with little attention to the emotional aspects of living alone and mediated forms of social contact.

OBJECTIVES

This study examined the lived experiences of older women living alone in Kerala, India, including living alone, television engagement, emotional coping, memory, and relational continuity.

DESIGN

A qualitative reflexive thematic analysis with phenomenological sensitivity was used. Twenty-two older women aged 62-79 years who lived alone in districts of Kerala were interviewed through semi-structured in-depth interviews. Interviews were conducted in Malayalam, and the data were analyzed using NVivo 14.

RESULTS

Four themes were found: (1) emotional silence, solitary aging, and everyday loneliness; (2) TV as everyday companionship and emotional presence; (3) mediation of emotional coping and psychological escape; and (4) parasocial relationships, memory, and emotional identification. Loneliness was expressed as a relational phenomenon, while TV functioned as a 'mediated companion' that supported emotional regulation, continuity, autobiographical reflection, and psychological comfort.

CONCLUSIONS

Mediated emotional life is an underacknowledged aspect of well-being in solitude. These findings have implications for gerontological assessment, social work practice, and mental health care for older women experiencing solitary aging.