Involuntary loneliness and the role of cultural heritage

Research study on the role of cultural heritage in counteracting involuntary loneliness.

Autumn 2023 completedCenter for Applied Heritage Researchat Stiftelsen Kiviks Museum & Archive, a larger research project on involuntary loneliness and how cultural heritage can contribute to counteracting the increasing loneliness. The project was financed by a grant from the National Board of Health and Welfare's national call for funds to combat involuntary loneliness.

The project resulted in a research report, which provides examples of good methods in working with involuntary loneliness, regardless of the target group's age, gender, ethnicity or functional variations. The report describes 23 partly different and partly similar methods from both Sweden and England in how to best work to counteract involuntary loneliness, and that broad cooperation between different actors is required if the work is to be successful and long-term sustainable.

In the project, a pilot study was also carried out together with associations, religious communities and the municipality of Tomelilla, with the intention of testing some methods from England, where they have successfully worked to counteract involuntary loneliness since the 1960s. As a museum, Kiviks Museum has since 2010 worked actively with various methods as a meeting place for different target groups in society, including those who are involuntarily alone, but also other risk groups for exclusion, including the unemployed, people in LSS and new Swedes. In order to strengthen our own work, find new work tools and develop collaborations - but also to identify methods from England that can contribute to strengthening the Swedish cultural heritage sector's role in countering involuntary loneliness, the Foundation applied for funds from the National Board of Health and Welfare. The pilot project has been very successful and funds for various follow-up studies and implementation of the working methods together with Swedish and English cultural heritage actors have been sought.

As research leader for the project, the foundation's museum manager, associate professor Dafvid Hermansson, was appointed, whose role has been to lead and coordinate the project and to inventory, document and summatively review the methods that were selected as representative to meet the various target groups of involuntarily alone. As a partner in the implementation of the pilot study, Maria Karlsson from Studieförbundet Vuxenskolan Skåneland was appointed, whose valuable knowledge and contacts with several of the organizations concerned contributed strongly to both the research study and to the implementation of the pilot project in Tomelilla.

Dafvid also contacted Peggy Dicksdotter Hermansson, whose experiences of, among other things, the connection between meal situations, appetite, health and well-being in the elderly and who completed the study "Coffee for life", were thought to be interesting for the project and the study, based on how elderly people who regularly participate in meals at day centers experience the appetite and well-being during weekends and longer breaks, for example during Christmas, when the food is not served in a context.

In connection with the announcement that Kiviks Museum received funds from the National Board of Health and Welfare for the research and implementation project for the involuntarily lonely, Dafvid was contacted by Linda Clavier, lecturer in social work at Malmö University, who would like to contribute in her research as a companion researcher to the project, and to have opportunity to look at the methods that were inventoried, but also together with Kiviks Museum to review and develop the methods for Swedish conditions and connect this to current research fields about both the role of museums in civil society and how collaboration can take place between civil society and the public sector.

A shorter version of the report is available for purchase in the shop at Kiviks Museum and ithe bookstore.

A longer version containing all three texts can be downloaded as a pdf here:To counteract involuntary loneliness.