By Maggie Meegan | Reporter
A group of sociology students worked with their professor to study the connection between loneliness and companionship, finding that quality of relationships combat loneliness more than quantity of relationships.
Sociology doctoral candidate from Bangladesh James Malo, Houston graduate student Brandon Brown and Houston doctoral candidate Meagan McGourty collaborated with with sociology professor Dr. Markus Schafer on a two-year study on loneliness in adults and its connection to companionship.
“We are always connected,” Malo said. “We call these networks companions, but they serve different networks within our lives.”
The research started as classwork for the graduate students in Schafer’s class and turned into a collaboration project with the professor to be published.
“We looked at the different dimensions of these social networks and how they affected us and how changes in them change us and can create loneliness,” Malo said.
The findings in their research did not show that having more connections led to lower chances of loneliness, but quality over quantity was the key across the two cohorts they observed.
“It doesn’t really explain loneliness,” McGourty said. “Your social network supports you and supports your individual emotional and social health needs. When we think of loneliness, we think that you are lacking friends, and that is not always true.”
The researchers focused on two different age demographics to conduct their research and went through eight to nine different papers to finally settle on a collective agreement.
“The younger cohort means 18-30 years old, and the older cohort ranged from 50-70 years old,” Malo said.
Seeking out companionship and keeping it may explain why people go through ups and downs of loneliness, especially when faced with change, McGourty said.
“It just suggests that companionship and why people seek companionship might be more complex than we initially thought,” McGourty said.
For those who are not a sociology major or into reading the discoveries of research in this field, the group emphasized that students may benefit from picking up their published findings on loneliness.
“So for anyone currently in college … I would highly recommend investing in your social circles and, if possible, trying to keep reaching out to your friends and family members,” McGourty said.
For more information on their research, students can find the full results published in the academic journal Elsevier.
“I know it is kind of cliché, but like reaching out and just being heard and leaning on your friends is not as bad as it seems,” McGourty said. “It is really beneficial not only for you, but also for them to keep those ties active.”
