Americans like to worry about being lonely. In 1950, David Riesman warned that Americans were so desperate to please and impress that they couldn’t really connect with others. In 2000, Robert Putnam fretted that Americans were isolated because they’d stopped joining clubs. Their books, The Lonely Crowd and Bowling Alone, were not only best sellers but sparked national conversations about why we’re not talking to each other, proving that a dour thesis and a zippy title can make you famous.
The new book Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone is decidedly sunnier. Sixty years ago, single adults made up 9 percent of American households. Now they account for 28 percent, more than the percentage of couples with kids. Yet those who live alone may lead more active social lives than co-habitators. Rather than search for someone to share dish duty, they have found reasons to prefer a room, or several rooms, of their own.
The author, Eric Klinenberg, a professor of sociology at New York University, tells the story of these singletons with care and complexity, viewing this social shift as a phenomenon to be explored rather than a crisis to be solved. But what piqued my curiosity was his mention of a 2006 Duke study that found that nearly a quarter of the population was “socially isolated,” more than double the number in 1985. It turns out, Mr. Klinenberg writes, there is evidence that this figure was off. As in, not even close.
This wasn’t just any study. For a while, that statistic was everywhere. It was the springboard for entire books, like the The Lonely American: Drifting Apart in the Twenty-First Century. Brows were furrowed, hands wrung. Yet in the years that followed, it became apparent to researchers that the supposed fact, the one that so many took as a sign that the fabric of American life had come unstitched, was questionable at best.
So what happened?
Researchers are still trying to figure that out. The number came from the 2004 General Social Survey, which, along with the U.S. Census, is among the most-used sources on societal trends. The fact that it was the vaunted GSS—a survey that “takes the pulse of America,” according to its Web site—and not some rinky-dink research made the problem more perplexing.
Even one of the authors of the 2006 study, Matthew Brashears, now an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University, no longer trusts that number. Smaller follow-up surveys have put the percentage of socially isolated Americans at 12 or 9 or 4. “I certainly don’t think it’s reliable,” he says. “It’s so volatile it suggests something strange is going on.”
The problem may be how the General Social Survey determines whether someone is socially isolated. It asks participants whom they have discussed important matters with in the previous six months. Some people say no one, and those people are deemed socially isolated. But, as sociologists already know, how and when a question is asked, and who is asking it, affect the answers. People have different definitions of “important.” Maybe they don’t want to reveal too much. Maybe they just can’t remember. “People are not reliable when they tell you they haven’t talked about important matters with anybody,” says Mr. Brashears.
The spotlight on the study was far brighter than the researchers expected. “It was a story that seemed to imply that all of Western civilization was imploding,” says Mr. Brashears, which, in fairness, is a somewhat stronger conclusion than the authors had reached. Reporters are notorious for breezing past caveats. Still, he acknowledges, “we played into it a little bit ourselves.”
One of the authors of The Lonely American, Richard Schwartz, an associate clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, now agrees that the number is most likely too high. “I think what’s very clear is that there is a significant portion of the population that is significantly socially isolated,” he says. “What the trend is is unclear.” The book, he says, is based on more than a single statistic.
That said, without the number there is no trend, and without the trend it’s hard to know whether Americans are actually getting lonelier.
Claude Fischer was suspicious from the beginning. Mr. Fischer, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the reviewers for the paper, published in American Sociological Review. He wrote a long, skeptical note at the time, including a line like “This better be right because it’s a New York Times finding.”
It did become fodder for The New York Times, along with dozens of other outlets. Later, when he started investigating the statistic, he became convinced it was bogus. “Even on the face of it,” he says, “it sort of assumes or suggests a social change on a scale that’s so dramatic that you have to look around and say, ‘Where did that come from? Was there a world war or great depression?’”
A possibly more accurate way to determine social isolation is to ask several questions on the topic. While the GSS asks about discussions during the past six months, Mr. Fischer says you get better answers if you prompt participants to recall more interactions. Mr. Brashears says he now favors that approach.
As for what, exactly, was amiss about the 2004 GSS statistic, an investigation by the researchers who run the survey was begun in 2010. Mr. Fischer says that Peter Marsden, a professor of sociology at Harvard University who is one of the survey’s principal investigators, is working on the postmortem, and that he expects to hear an answer from him in the near future. (Mr. Marsden wrote in an e-mail that he couldn’t comment on any specific part of the survey.)
Mr. Fischer published a book last year, Still Connected: Family and Friends in America Since 1970, that takes on, among other topics, the 2006 Duke study. The book didn’t get nearly the same level of attention as, say, Bowling Alone, but it’s a lucid, informative treatise with a pretty dull message: We are roughly as socially active as we were a few decades ago.
The success of Bowling Alone helped set the stage for the Duke study. We already knew something was rotten in American society, and here was further proof that our personal relationships were crumbling. But Bowling Alone, too, may have overstated the case. For instance, Mr. Putnam reported that in the 1970s, Americans invited friends over to their homes 14 to 15 times per year. By the 1990s, that number had fallen by almost half. That is, as he wrote, “bad news.”
Mr. Fischer agrees that studies show that people entertain less frequently in their homes. But studies also show that they still hang out with friends elsewhere. Most of the evidence “suggests that Americans saw their friends in person about as often in the 2000s as they did in the 1970s,” he says. In other words, nothing much has changed.
Boring? Sure. But the truth is like that sometimes.
