Text-based online and offline social connectedness on psychological resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic

A large body of literature suggests that one of the factors associated with resilience is one's social connectedness. Lack of social connectedness has been associated with poor physical health and psychiatric disorders as well as existential problems in numerous studies. Considering the times the world is going through, characterized by the Coronavirus pandemic, we have to consider the prevalence of text-based online connections rather than offline (face-to-face) connections. The purpose of this study was to explore how text-based online and offline social connectedness are related to psychological resilience. The sample is composed of 500 individuals over 18 years of age in Turkey. Results demonstrated that both text-based online and offline social connectedness are significantly associated with psychological resilience. Findings also revealed that psychological resilience differs across gender, relationship status, living arrangement and socioeconomic status groups. In addition, the regression model for text-based online social connectedness explains 36.3 percent of variance in psychological resilience and the model for offline social connectedness explains 45.1 percent of variance in psychological resilience. As predicted, offline social connectedness explained more variance in psychological resilience than did text-based online social connectedness. Clinical implications of the findings are explored in the discussion.