Leisure Activities and Loneliness Among
People with Disabilities
Ricardo Pagan
1 Introduction
Loneliness has attracted significant attention from government leaders, policy
makers, employers, public institutions, non-profit associations, health and social care
providers, academics and researchers in the last decades (e.g. de Jong Gierveld et al.
2006; Hawkley et al. 2010; Tanskanen and Anttila 2016; Courtin and Knapp 2017).
Peplau and Perlman (1982) define loneliness as a perceived discrepancy between the
desired and actual quantity and quality of social relations. According to the existing
literature, loneliness has a significant impact on mental health, cognitive function,
mortality, sleep quality, stroke, hypertension, and happiness (e.g. Hawkley et al.
2003, 2010; Wilson et al. 2007; Luo et al. 2012; Saygin et al. 2015; Vatorta et al.
2016; Hawkley 2019), especially among older people who are more likely to have
weaker physical health and live alone, with fewer social relationships (Victor et al.
2005; Kobayashi and Steptoe 2018). Furthermore, the prevalence of loneliness can
be particularly high for some groups of individuals that traditionally suffer from
higher levels of stigmatization, discrimination, marginalization and social exclusion,
such as, for example, people with disabilities (Dykstra et al. 2004; Paul el at. 2006;
Korporaal et al. 2008; Macdonald et al. 2018).
R. Pagan (B)
Department of Applied Economics, University of Malaga, Plaza de El Ejido s/n, 29.071, Malaga,
Spain
e-mail: rpr@uma.es
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
A. Lubowiecki-Vikuk et al. (eds.), Handbook of Sustainable Development and Leisure
Services, World Sustainability Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59820-4_5
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