Laurence, James;
(2025)
Spatial immobility and the dynamics of loneliness, social capital, and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Public Health
, Article 105979. 10.1016/j.puhe.2025.105979.
(In press).
Preview |
PDF
Spatial immobility, loneliness, social capital, and mental health - JLaurence.pdf - Published Version Download (1MB) | Preview |
Abstract
Objectives: COVID-19 lockdowns and wider mixing restrictions severely disrupted people's lives with potentially acute implications for their mental health. This study examines how mixing restrictions affected people's loneliness and how far loneliness, in turn, can explain any impact of restrictions on psychological distress. In addition, the study explores whether local social capital (LSC) in residential communities buffered any impact of mixing restrictions on loneliness, and subsequently protected people's mental health, during the pandemic. Study design: Individuals are drawn from three waves of the nationally representative COVID-19 UK Household Longitudinal Study (n = 24,481 person-observations). To measure the impact of social mixing restrictions, respondents are matched with daily community-level (Local Authority) spatial immobility data from Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports. Methods: Fixed-effects longitudinal modelling is applied to address time invariant unobserved heterogeneity in estimates of the associations between spatial immobility, loneliness and psychological distress. Results: Increasing spatial immobility is associated with increasing loneliness, which is linked with greater psychological distress. However, LSC moderates these associations. Spatial immobility has a weaker positive association with loneliness among individuals with higher LSC. It also has a weaker positive association with distress among higher-LSC individuals. LSC moderates the relationship between spatial immobility and psychological distress because individuals with higher LSC report less loneliness under conditions of increasing spatial immobility. Conclusion: Spatial immobility increased loneliness, in turn, harming mental health. However, LSC protected individuals’ mental health due to its buffering-effect against loneliness. Investing in communities to foster LSC is thus important for crisis-preparedness to minimise the harm of national crises on mental health.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Spatial immobility and the dynamics of loneliness, social capital, and mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1016/j.puhe.2025.105979 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2025.105979 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2025 The Author. Published by Elsevier Ltd on behalf of The Royal Society for Public Health. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
| Keywords: | Psychological distress, Loneliness, COVID-19 pandemic, Social isolation, Spatial immobility, Social capital |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Education > UCL Institute of Education > IOE - Social Research Institute |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10216792 |
Archive Staff Only
 |
View Item |
