The surgeon general described what he calls the "loneliness epidemic" while visiting ASU last year. He talked about a wide range of effects, from physical and mental health, to attitudes toward democracy.
For example, lacking human connection can have the same impact on a person’s mortality as smoking 15 cigarettes daily, according to a report from the surgeon general last year.
But how do you tackle a problem like loneliness on a national scale?
Researchers with the Center for Inclusion and Belonging have developed a tool to help, called the Belonging Barometer. It’s a set of 10 questions, designed to measure a person’s sense of belonging in different settings.
“Belonging is one of those qualities that I think can feel a little bit amorphous, and sort of hard to wrap your arms around,” said the center’s director, Kim Serrano. “Like, what does that actually mean?”
As they relate to belonging, social connection and belonging are “very much related, but a little different.”
With the Belonging Barometer, researchers focused on three main factors: social connection, psychological safety, and co-creation and agency.
“What we see is that when all three of those things are high, that experience of belonging is high,” Serrano said.
Sometimes, said Serrano, people experience “a feeling of belonging that’s tied to a place as opposed to people.”
With such a nuanced, nebulous topic to get a handle on with data, researchers have their work cut out for them. Serrano said one useful way to approach it has been to represent belonging as a spectrum.
“It’s one of the most important things that we saw when we put together the barometer, as well as when we did a national survey with the barometer tool to kind of take the pulse on the state of belonging in the country,” she said. “Which is that it's not like a light switch. It's not like something that you either feel belonging or you feel exclusion. Actually, most of us are somewhere in between.”
While the pandemic brought conversations about isolation and togetherness to the forefront, trying to figure out what drives different experiences with these feelings goes back further than some might expect.
“The trends that we're looking at in the data around levels of trust, level of loneliness, levels of belonging in the U.S.,” said Serrano, “these are trends that have been ongoing for many years. But in many ways the pandemic really, I think, opened up a lot of our eyes.”
A national survey using the Belonging Barometer found that roughly two-thirds of Americans report some level of ambiguity or lack of belonging.
So the question becomes: “How do we create settings where more people can feel like they belong?”
Which Serrano said is one of researchers’ next targets; understanding how varying environments or demographics might affect different people's experiences with belonging.
“Ultimately, what we see is that belonging is not a zero-sum experience,” she said. “When your belonging is high, it doesn’t necessarily mean that mine has to be low. We can both experience belonging, but there may be these contextual factors that are impacting us differently.”
Regardless of background and experience, said Serrano, high levels of belonging correlate with “other really positive outcomes, like better health outcomes, stronger kind of civic trust, and greater life satisfaction.”
By expanding use of the Barometer, Serrano expressed hope that the research and frameworks to come “can help folks feel comforted and feel seen.”
“The good news is that if you’re feeling that,” she said of the two-thirds feeling a sense of ambiguity or un-belonging, “you’re probably not the only one. It can change.”
Even those feeling well-connected have a place in the path toward solutions.
“You have the power to offer and to bring in and to invite someone else to have that experience,” said Serrano. “When you think about two thirds of Americans [that] are having some level of this experience, that means you probably have someone in your life that you could make a big difference for.”
