Social workers’ encounters with loneliness and social isolation

Abstract

Summary

This article examines the role of Social Work in addressing loneliness and social isolation among older adults. A sequential mixed methods study was conducted in Barcelona (Spain), with a total sample of 425 participants. The qualitative component (30 interviews; 4 focus groups; n = 74) involved older adults, social workers, technical managers, and other relevant agents. The quantitative component was a survey of practicing social workers (n = 351). Analysis integrated inductive coding and descriptive statistics to interpret professional encounters with loneliness and expectations placed on the profession.

Findings

Loneliness and social isolation cut across gerontological practice: ∼80% of professionals report intervening very frequently/frequently, and ∼70% routinely include these issues in social diagnosis. Detection emerges as a distinctive competence grounded in attention and an ethic of encounter, yet less visible (e.g., existential) forms remain hard to identify. Encounters concentrate around life transitions (health decline, loss of autonomy, bereavement, network changes) and appear across service levels. Expectations are ambivalent: recognition of accompaniment and listening coexists with critiques of bureaucratization, institutional rigidity, and resource scarcity linked to structural precariousness.

Applications

Strengthening Social Work’s contribution requires preventive and community-based policies, specialized training, and ecosocial, interdisciplinary frameworks. Priorities include systematized detection (including hidden forms), integration of life-course and intersectional perspectives in assessment and planning, and improved service accessibility and resourcing to sustain relationship-based practice and foster bonds, recognition, and meaning in later life.

Keywords

Social work aging mixed methods older people social capital loneliness social isolation gerontological social work life-course perspective

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