Prevalence and patterns of social isolation across the life-course in populations living with impairment

Social connectedness or social capital is of vital importance for people's psychological and physical welfare. It has been consistently shown that people living with impairments have a more limited access to informal social interactions and as a result they are at risk of decreased social capital and social isolation. Changes in the social and political discourse have shifted social attitudes towards a perception of disability in terms of 'personal experience' arising from the interactions of individual and socially created factors. Up to date, no comparative research has been conducted on the levels of social isolation experienced by people living with different types of impairments. This project aims to fill this gap by examining the characteristics of people who are most at risk of social isolation due to the way their specific impairment interacts with social/environmental structures. The proposed research also aims to compare the patterns of mediators and moderators underlying social isolation across groups of people with impairments and explore if these patterns change across the life-course.

Methods:
Using the theoretical framework of the ICF model of disability, I would like to conduct secondary data analysis on the Life Opportunities Survey (waves 1,2,3) to:
- Construct a measure of social isolation/social connectedness;
- Create a typology of social isolation defined by its underlying reasons;
- Explore the characteristics of those who are most at risk of social isolation;
- Compare the prevalence and nature of social isolation experienced by disabled people to that experienced by the non-disabled population;
- Explore how the degree of social isolation changes over time, and what are the key risk/protective factors eliciting this change;
- Examine if there are any specific patterns of personal/ environmental risk/protective factors that overlap across impairments.