Abstract:
The original study by Graham et al. (2024) investigated whether loneliness changes with age across the adult lifespan, synthesizing data from nine longitudinal studies via meta-analyses. The primary fi nding was that loneliness follows a U-shaped trajectory: decreasing from young adulthood to midlife and increasing in older adulthood (estimated Age2 regression coeffi cient of 0.07 with 95% confi dence interval from 0.02 to 0.13, age centered at 60 years). We computationally reproduced the reported meta-analyses. We assessed the robustness of the main fi nding with respect to alternative analytic decisions regarding the estimation of the heterogeneity variance and inclusion/exclusion of individual studies. We fi nd that the main claim from Graham et al. (2024) is robust regarding these decisions.