Surveys before, early on in and towards the end of the covid-19 pandemic suggest that although older people’s well-being dipped in 2020, it increased once virus-related restrictions in England were lifted
By Carissa Wong
12 February 2025
The pandemic may have changed people’s outlook on life
DisobeyArt / Alamy
The covid-19 pandemic gave older people in England a stronger sense of purpose and greater life satisfaction, possibly because it deepened their appreciation for the simple things in life.
We already knew that some people’s well-being and life satisfaction dipped during the early years of the pandemic, but what happened later on, after most restrictions had been lifted, is less well understood. “Unfortunately, most of the studies that were carried out did not continue [in the later years of] the pandemic, so there was a big gap in the research,” says Paola Zaninotto at University College London.
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To address this, Zaninotto and her colleagues analysed data from surveys on the well-being and depressive symptoms of nearly 4000, mainly white, people in England, all of whom were aged 50 or older at the time of the study.
Each participant completed a survey in the two years running up to the pandemic, a second one in the first year of the pandemic in 2020 and a final one between the end of 2021 and early 2023. More than 85 per cent of participants filled in this last survey in 2022, after most infection-control measures in England had ended.
The team found that, before the pandemic, the participants rated their sense of purpose in life with an average score of 7.5 out of 10. This dropped to 7.2 in 2020, before rising to 7.6 – above pre-pandemic levels – in the final survey.