ABSTRACT
This chapter starts with an examination of the overall relationship between loneliness and age across a large number of countries. Then it zooms in by taking Poland and The Netherlands as two cases for the purpose of illustrating the effects of national contexts. Indeed, loneliness is a problem for older people, but the national context appears to have a much stronger impact. Frequent loneliness is more prevalent among females than among males, regardless of age. Marriage has failed to shield the Polish from feeling lonely. The analysis then moves on to examine the combinatory effects of age and gender, and gender and marital status. The combined effects of age and the number of people living regularly in the same household, those aged 60+ and living alone are indeed the most vulnerable, but the level of vulnerability is higher in Poland than in The Netherlands. The combined effects of age and health are studied as well, where health is measured with two factors: self-reported overall health and immobility. When people are in old age and less mobile than they used to, the chance of feeling frequently lonely becomes very high. While statistics about loneliness across all age groups and a large number of countries are not yet available, existing data suggest that loneliness may not be less prevalent among youth than among the adult populations. Younger American adolescents seemed lonelier than the older adolescents (16+), and girls are more likely to be very lonely than boys across all nations.
