THE SOLITARY AND INTERACTIVE MOMENTS OF CIVIC ENGAGEMENT: INSIGHTS ON SOCIAL ISOLATION

Civic engagement contributes to successful aging by providing social interaction that helps older adults maintain active engagement within the community. However, many forms of civic engagement involve both interactive and solitary activities. This paper examines whether the effect of civic engagement on feelings of social connectedness is only observed in interactive- but not solitary- civic engagement activities. In the experiencing sampling data from older civic engagement exemplars, on average, 48.7% of the time spent in civic engagement activities was solitary (rather than interactive). Interactive civic engagement activities appear to provide a higher level of social connectedness than solitary civic engagement and interactive non-civic engagement activities. More importantly, in solitary civic engagement activities, the exemplars experienced a similar level of social connectedness to that in interactive non-civic engagement activities. These findings provide insight on how the solitary part of civic engagement need not contribute to social isolation.