DAN Faculty in the News
Professor Julie Schermer and Western M.A. student Kristi MacDonald were featured in the London Free Press in an article titled: Amid pandemic lockdown, you're not alone at feeling alone.
Excerpt from the London Free Press:
Social science researchers are going to have a field day once we all are freed from our respective cocoons, and the effects of loneliness may be a key question.
It already has been for Julie Aitken Schermer, a Western University management and organizational studies professor, who, along with master’s student Kristi MacDonald and two Dutch researchers, published a paper this week in the journal, Social Science, about predicting loneliness based on where people live and what they do.
Loneliness has already been shown as a cause for a litany of mental and physical issues, such as heart disease, depression, elevated stress, and abuse of drugs and alcohol.
The new research focused on a large sample from The Netherlands and found people who live in highly urban environments, like big cities, “tend to be lonelier than individuals who live in less urban environments,” such as suburbs or rural areas, Schermer said.
