Field Notes / The research desk
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A hand-built reading room for loneliness, dating apps, real-world dating and the rooms people are asked to meet in.
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Journalism
A column examining whether the growing availability of preventative health tests can turn uncertainty into a new source of anxiety, and what it means to live with more medical information.
Published byThe Observer
↗Journalism
Eleven readers describe how GLP-1 medicines have changed conversations about food, bodies, intimacy and support within their relationships.
Published byThe Guardian
↗Journalism
A look at how Strava has expanded while keeping running at its centre, offering a useful case study in how a shared practice can sustain a community as a platform grows.
Published byMarketing Week
↗Journalism
An exploration of tiramisu’s renewed popularity, using the dessert trend to consider nostalgia, indulgence and the cultural meanings people attach to shared food.
Published byThe Guardian
↗Journalism
Tess Reidy reports that changing social trends, costs and flexible timetables are making it more likely for students to live at home while studying, asking what this shift could mean for campus life and the social connections it can offer.
Published byThe Guardian
↗Journalism
Meehika Barua argues that the abundance built into online dating can make it harder to become curious about one person, tolerate uncertainty or feel satisfied with a choice.
Published byTIME
↗Journalism
An interview with Ash Sarkar examining how dating platforms turned romance into an optimised, screen-mediated marketplace, and why growing fatigue with that model may be pushing people back towards real-life intimacy.
Published byThe Standard
↗Government Data / Thinktank
One in 20 young people in England now report having no close friends at all, up from one in 100 in 2014. The proportion of 16-21 year olds with at least three close friends fell from 85% in 2012-14 to 72% in 2023-25. The report attributes the decline to youth club closures, unaffordable housing, social media use and a loss of self esteem among young people.
Published byInstitute for Public Policy Research (IPPR)
↗Government Data
UK audience data documents a sharp annual fall in users across Tinder, Bumble and Hinge. Ofcom has moved the original report; this link points to its maintained Online Habits collection.
Published byOfcom
↗Government Data
The latest official England measures of loneliness, social support and belonging.
Published byDepartment for Culture, Media and Sport
↗Government Data
The UK strategy published after the Jo Cox Commission, including the appointment of the first Minister for Loneliness.
Published byHM Government
↗Government Data
A major advisory framing social disconnection as a public-health problem and setting out a national strategy.
Published byUS Surgeon General
↗Research
A long-view account of the Harvard Study of Adult Development and its central finding that the quality of close relationships matters more than their number.
Published byHarvard Gazette
↗Platforms & Products
The service's public positioning describes dinners in which six people are matched to meet over a meal.
Published by222
↗Platforms & Products
The service's public positioning describes algorithmically matched dinners with strangers as a route to meeting people offline.
Published byTimeleft
↗Government Data
Japan's cross-government response following the appointment of a minister responsible for loneliness and isolation.
Published byCabinet Office, Japan
↗Government Data
Local-area estimates show how loneliness varies geographically rather than behaving as one national condition.
Published byOffice for National Statistics
↗Government Data
A global programme examining social isolation and loneliness as determinants of health.
Published byWorld Health Organization
↗Government Data
Measures of neighbourhood trust, social networks, civic engagement and belonging across the UK.
Published byOffice for National Statistics
↗Research
A consensus review of the health evidence, risk factors and interventions for social isolation and loneliness.
Published byNational Academies of Sciences
↗Research
A meta-analysis linking weak social connection with increased risk of premature mortality.
Published byPerspectives on Psychological Science
↗Research
Julianne Holt-Lunstad argues that social connection should be treated as a core public-health priority.
Published byAmerican Psychologist
↗Research
The foundational paper behind one of the most widely used measures of subjective loneliness.
Published byJournal of Personality and Social Psychology
↗Research
A revised scale designed to measure loneliness without asking respondents to label themselves lonely.
Published byJournal of Personality and Social Psychology
↗Research
A meta-analysis of 148 studies examining the relationship between social ties and survival.
Published byPLOS Medicine
↗Research
A review of the biological and behavioural pathways through which perceived isolation may affect health.
Published byAnnals of Behavioral Medicine
↗Research
A systematic review connecting the quality and structure of social relationships with depression.
Published byJournal of Affective Disorders
↗Research
A modelling study asks how online dating may reshape social networks and marriage across group boundaries.
Published byMIT Technology Review / research summary
↗Research
US couple data suggests online dating can connect people beyond their existing social networks.
Published byPNAS
↗Research
Experiments examine how repeated choice can increase rejection and reduce satisfaction in online dating.
Published bySocial Psychological and Personality Science
↗Research
Messaging data reveals hierarchies of desirability and the aspirational patterns they produce.
Published byScience Advances
↗Research
A critical review finds that access and communication help, while claims about matching algorithms lack independent evidence.
Published byPsychological Science in the Public Interest
↗Research
Research explores how market-style interfaces can shape the way daters evaluate other people.
Published byJournal of Social and Personal Relationships
↗Research
A systematic review surveys the emerging evidence on who uses dating apps and associated psychosocial factors.
Published byInternational Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health
↗Research
A current systematic review and meta-analysis assesses the relationship between swipe-based dating-app use and mental-health outcomes.
Published byCommunications Psychology
↗Research
Research examines how overload and vulnerability contribute to exhaustion in app-mediated dating.
Published byCurrent Psychology
↗Research
A systematic review looks beyond individual traits to the community and social conditions shaping loneliness in young adulthood.
Published byEpidemiologic Reviews
↗Research
A UK and German study examines well-being among young adults who remain consistently single.
Published byJournal of Personality and Social Psychology
↗Research
A study of how swipe volume and direction affect decision-making in dating-app environments.
Published byMedia Psychology
↗Research
An agent-based model explores how emotional responses and repeated engagement can reinforce one another in swipe interfaces.
Published byComputers in Human Behavior Reports
↗Research
Research examines dating fatigue, coping behaviour and the expectations that can make digital dating feel self-defeating.
Published bySN Social Sciences
↗Research
An interpretative study documents how millennial women describe the repetitive emotional labour of dating apps.
Published byFatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior
↗Research
A close analysis of how Bumble's time limits turn interface design into behavioural pressure.
Published byDiscourse, Context & Media
↗Research
A formative study asks how algorithmic dating environments may intersect with loneliness and men's public health.
Published byJMIR Formative Research
↗Research
Longitudinal evidence examines how personal agency and social connection relate to changes in loneliness.
Published byCommunications Psychology
↗Research
A contemporary clinical perspective places loneliness and social connection inside the wider mental-health crisis.
Published byBiological Psychiatry
↗Research
Research into pictureless dating asks what changes when appearance is delayed rather than made the first filter.
Published byJournal of Social and Personal Relationships
↗Research
A qualitative study explores how dating-app use can shape men's and women's experiences of body image.
Published byJournal of Social and Personal Relationships
↗Research
An analysis of how framing the issue around loneliness or social connection can lead policy in different directions.
Published byHealth Psychology
↗Journalism
An analysis of slowing growth, product fatigue and the pressure on the industry's largest companies.
Published byFinancial Times
↗Journalism
An early account of Tinder's Elo-style desirability score and the assumptions behind it.
Published byFast Company
↗Journalism
Tinder says it moved beyond Elo and describes activity, distance, preferences and likes as ranking signals.
Published byTinder
↗Journalism
The platform's own guide to matching, opening moves and its expiring-match mechanics.
Published byBumble
↗Journalism
A readable synthesis of the evidence connecting social isolation, loneliness and health.
Published byHarvard Magazine
↗Journalism
An examination of how abundance, distance and app choice can complicate the route to sustained connection.
Published byThe New York Times
↗Journalism
A report on the social conditions behind Britain's appointment of a Minister for Loneliness.
Published byThe Economist
↗Dalloway Field Notes
An argument that exhaustion can be a rational response to the structure of swipe-based dating.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗Dalloway Field Notes
What happens when conversation becomes an audition, and what a room might ask of people instead.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗Dalloway Field Notes
A careful separation of urban density from the conditions that let familiarity and belonging develop.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗Dalloway Field Notes
A firsthand argument about stranger dinners, retention mechanics and what it could mean to treat loneliness as a signal rather than a malfunction.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗Dalloway Field Notes
Why judging an event only by what resolves before closing time narrows what a room can make possible.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗Dalloway Field Notes
A note on incomplete evidence, ticketing incentives and how format can intensify an uneven room.
Published byThe Dalloway Project
↗No record matches that question yet.
This is a curated index, not a comprehensive literature review.
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