For a while I had a lot of posts about the claim that there has been a decline in social connection. I was reminded of the issue by a New York Times story which drew on a recent paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinities. The opening sentence of that paper: "A variety of global research reports suggest that the size and quality of men's social networks has declined disproportionately in relation to women in the last 30 years (Cox, 2021; Gallup Organisation, 1990; Figures 1 and 2)..." The citations involve two surveys of the United States, one in 1990 and one in 2021 (the Figures 1 and 2 in the citation are based on data from those surveys), so "variety" is an exaggeration, but the difference between those surveys is dramatic. To quote from the New York Times: "In a 2021 survey, 15 percent of men said they didn’t have any close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990." My calculations were slightly different (maybe because of treatment of "don't knows") but also showed a dramatic increase 4.3% in 1990 and 16.4% in 2021. However, the Times didn't mention that there was also an increase in the number of women reporting no close friends: from 1.6% to 11.6%. That is, it increased by a factor of seven, compared to a factor of four among men. The mean number of reported friends for men went from 11.3 in the 1990 survey to 5.2 in 2021; among women, it went from 8.2 to 4.7. So you could argue about whether the "friendship recession" was larger among men or women: either way, if you go by the comparison of these surveys, it was substantial among both and limiting your attention to either men or women alone is misleading.
But is the difference between those surveys a reflection of a change in society or of differences in the surveys themselves? I wrote about this issue a few years ago, and noted a couple of differences: the 1990 survey was by telephone and the 2021 survey was an online panel and the 2021 question was preceded by a number of questions about whether you had done various things with friends recently, which may have pushed people towards a stricter definition of "close" friend. I noticed another difference when I looked this time: in 2021, the question about the number of close friends is preceded by "Now, thinking only about the friends you are close to…" You could say that doesn't matter--they just said "close" again. However, I wonder if some people interpreted that in geographical terms: "close to" as "live close by," and answer the next question in terms of only those close friends living nearby.
The Times offered another piece of evidence about the plight of men: "in 1990, nearly half of young men said they would reach out to friends when facing a personal issue; two decades later, just over 20 percent said the same." In this case, the questions were the same "Who do you usually talk to first when you have a personal problem?" Among young men, there was indeed a shift away from friends and towards parents--but was this because they had fewer friends, or because they became closer to their parents? The question asked about who you talked to first, not about whether you would talk to your friends.
So my general conclusion is that: (1) we don't know whether there's been a decline in friendship or social connections and (2) if there has, the evidence is that it's been similar among men and women. There's also a more technical but still important point: men are more likely to report having no friends than women are, but also more likely to report having large numbers of friends. That is, the difference is not a straightforward matter of men having fewer friends.*
Despite the public interest in this topic, there don't seem to be any other recent surveys. The question on number of close friends was first asked in 1976 and then was asked a number of times, mostly by Gallup, until 2003. Since then, it hasn't been repeated except in the 2021 survey (there have been some other questions about friends and/or social connections, but none have been repeated over a span of more than a few years).
*Of course, reports of the number of friends don't tell you about the nature of those friendships, and it's possible that men and women differ in what they mean by "close friend." But this just adds to the general point that we don't have much information.
[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]
