Lonely Older Adults in the Era of Social Media: A Meta-Analytic Review

In an increasingly digital modern society, the loneliness of older adults is a pressing public health concern, and social media is considered a potential solution. Despite past reviews that have attempted to synthesize the association between social media usage (SMU) and loneliness in older adults, the precise connection between the two remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to quantify the direct relationship between SMU and loneliness in older adults.

As of August 2023, three databases (Web of Science, ProQuest, PubMed) were used for the literature search. A study was included if it measured the relationship between loneliness and SMU in older people over 50 years old. In total, the present study identified 29 effect sizes, representing data from 19 distinct research reports and over 24,877 participants.

The meta-analysis applying a random model, shows a weak negative correlation between SMU and loneliness (r = -.06). The region development moderated the relationship, and specifically, the negative correlation between SMU and loneliness increased to a medium size (r = -.24) when the samples were in developing regions.

SMU is negatively correlated with loneliness in old age, which suggests that promotion of SMU among older adults should be implemented, with attention to the inequality between regions and the privacy and availability concerns of older adults. Future research needs to make more efforts in terms of terminology consistency and potential moderators to obtain a more robust understanding of the association between SMU and the loneliness of older adults.