Description

The activity consists of a seminar followed by an interactive ideation and Q&A session. The first part will be a presentation given by Dr. Aurelio Fernández on Project AMISTAD, a large-scale research project that reframes loneliness by shifting attention from the quantity of social contact to the quality, balance, and contextual fit of everyday social and solitudinal experiences. AMISTAD departs from the premise that loneliness often results not from being alone, but from a mismatch between people's social needs and expectations and their actual daily experiences. Dr. Fernández will outline how the project studies social interaction and solitude as interconnected processes shaping both momentary and long-term loneliness, and how digital media use, physical environments, individual characteristics, and cultural representations affect them. He will also present the project's methodological design, which combines experience sampling with passive smartphone sensing in nationally representative Spanish samples. 

Building on this, the floor will open to an ideation and Q&A session in which participants relate the project's theoretical and methodological choices to their own work. The goal is to identify where research objectives align and to explore opportunities for conceptual and methodological cross-pollination across research groups.