Loneliness is often treated as a problem of social opportunity: if an older adult is lonely, the solution is to help them connect with more people. We think of creating activities, building social networks, and increasing contact. Realistically, connection is much more complicated than contact.
New research examining social anxiety and loneliness among older adults found that the size and structure of someone’s social network did not fully explain the relationship between social anxiety and loneliness. Instead, the findings point toward an important distinction for aging-services providers: having people available and feeling comfortable engaging socially are not always the same thing.
The Research
Researchers studied 279 adults age 65 and older who received services through eight public health centers in Kashan, Iran, between November 2024 and March 2025. About 36% of the study participants were at risk for social isolation.
Participants completed established measures of social anxiety, loneliness, social network size and contact, and perceived social support. The researchers then used hierarchical regression to examine which factors remained associated with loneliness after accounting for demographic characteristics. They also tested whether social network and perceived social support statistically mediated the relationship between social anxiety and loneliness.
In this study, researchers define social network as describing structural connection, relationships with family and friends, while perceived social support captures whether someone feels that meaningful support is actually available to them in real time.
Research Findings
- Higher social anxiety was associated with greater loneliness.
- Social anxiety and loneliness were positively correlated (r = .30, p < .001).
- Greater perceived social support was associated with less loneliness.
- The relationship was relatively strong (r = −.47, p < .001). A larger social network was also associated with less loneliness in the initial analysis (r = −.33, p < .001).
- Social anxiety and perceived support remained important when researchers considered the variables together.
- After demographic characteristics and other study variables were included, greater social anxiety remained associated with greater loneliness (β = .21, p < .001), while greater perceived social support remained associated with lower loneliness (β = −.35, p < .001). Adding the psychological and social variables increased the model’s explained variance from 18% to 34%.
- Social network size did not remain independently associated with loneliness in the adjusted model.
- Once other variables were considered, the relationship was no longer statistically significant (p = .468).
- Neither social network nor perceived social support explained or mediated the relationship between social anxiety and loneliness.
- Both bootstrap confidence intervals included zero. Social anxiety remained directly associated with loneliness after these potential pathways were considered.
Why Does This Matter for Kansas Providers?
For aging-services providers, the study raises an important question about how we think about loneliness before deciding how to address it. If interacting with other people involves discomfort, fear of evaluation, or avoidance, simply offering more opportunities for interaction may not change how someone experiences connection. Likewise, the study found that the structural size of a person’s network and their perception of available support behaved differently in the analyses.
Additionally, an older adult can have family, friends, neighbors, communal meals, activities, and opportunities for interaction and still be lonely. Increasing the number of opportunities for connection may therefore address one dimension of the problem without addressing another. That doesn’t mean Kansas providers should begin treating social anxiety as the explanation for loneliness. This was a cross-sectional study of older adults attending health centers in Iran, where family and intergenerational relationships may differ meaningfully from those in Kansas. The authors themselves note that these cultural conditions may partly explain their findings.
What the research offers is a more nuanced way to ask the following questions:
· Is this person lacking opportunities for connection?
· Are they lacking relationships they experience as supportive?
· Are they experiencing discomfort within social interaction?
- Are they experiencing some combination of these?
What Can You Do?
Look beyond participation when thinking about loneliness.
Attendance at meals, activities, programs, or other social opportunities tells you that contact occurred; it does not necessarily tell you whether someone feels connected.
Distinguish social network from perceived support.
The study measured these separately, and they did not behave identically. Consider whether your own assessments or conversations distinguish between who is in someone’s life and whether that person experiences those relationships as supportive.
Consider social comfort alongside social opportunity.
The association between social anxiety and loneliness remained even after social network and perceived support were included in the model. When exploring loneliness, social interaction itself may therefore be another relevant dimension to consider.
Avoid assuming that “more socialization” is one intervention for one problem.
This study does not establish which interventions reduce loneliness, but it does suggest that loneliness may reflect different combinations of psychological and social experiences. Matching a response to what appears to be contributing to an individual’s experience is a more evidence-consistent starting point than assuming network expansion alone will address it.
Read the research: The Relationship Between Social Anxiety and Loneliness in Older Adults: A Hierarchical Regression and Mediation Analysis
