Are People Nowadays Really More Lonely And Miserable?
(ANALYSIS) I am really digging what the Census Bureau has been up to lately. And, yes, I fully understand how incredibly nerdy that last sentence sounds. But it’s true! I’m always on the lookout for new and interesting data, and the Census Bureau rarely provides me with anything of value.
Of course it does the decennial census, which is constitutionally mandated. But honestly, that survey kind of sucks because it’s not a survey — it’s a census. It contains really basic demographic questions and little else. There’s a good reason for that, by the way. In some cases, the bureau is legally prohibited from asking about certain topics, but also you want to keep that one brief so that response rate goes up. That’s really the goal.
The Census Bureau also has the American Communities Survey, which is a bit better. It’s fielded on an annual basis and asks a lot more probing questions about education and finances among other things. It’s a really valuable tool for allocating things like grant funding and for businesses to understand where people live and what they want. But again, there’s not a whole lot in the area of traditional social science.
But things have changed! In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Census Bureau launched a new survey called the Household Pulse Survey. It’s an online instrument that takes about twenty minutes to complete, and the goal is to help policymakers and stakeholders understand what is happening on the ground in near real time. The bureau is constantly fielding the instrument and releasing the results for public consumption. Be still my data-obsessed heart. I am going to show you some data from the Phase 4.1 study, which was fielded between April 2 and July 22, 2024. That means that this data is less than six months old. Fantastic.
I am going to pull out some questions that piqued my interest when I was scrolling through the codebook. The first is a set of two questions about mental health. Folks were asked, “How often do you get the social and emotional support you need?”
Response options ranged from “always” to “never,” and because the total sample size of this survey is over 72,000, that means I can break this down by individual birth year.
Among people born in the 1940s and 1950s, there’s quite a bit of evidence that they are getting a lot of support.
For instance, among those born in 1950, 40% say they always get the support they need, and another 35% usually get that support. That’s clearly the vast majority. In contrast, just 10% of the sample say that they never or rarely get emotional and social support. The impression that I get here is that older folks are feeling pretty good about their support network.
Among younger people, the picture is a whole lot different. Tracing the “always” line is instructive here. Among people born in 1940, it’s about 42%. Among people born in 1960, it’s 35%.
For those born in 1980, it’s 24%, and for the youngest adults in the sample, only 17% say that they ‘always’ feel like they get the emotional and social support that they need. While that line is headed downward, the corollary is the “sometimes” trend. It goes from about 6% among those born in the 1940s to about 30% among those born around 2000.
To read the rest of Ryan Burge’s column, click here.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.