LTRN: What is your main area of research?
Dr Creaven:  “So I have two. One is around loneliness and the other is around support for people living with chronic health conditions, particularly diabetes, and particularly type-one diabetes and gestational diabetes at the moment.

I’m interested in lots of different aspects of loneliness. Some key questions I’m interested in are around understanding people who might underreport loneliness when asked directly. I am also interested in understanding what loneliness looks like in more marginalised groups, so I’m developing some tests of this idea of ‘loneliness of the odd one out’.

Loneliness is obviously located in a person, and that they experience it as a subjective experience, but I would be interested to see what structures socially mean that there might be lonely communities.“

LTRN: How did you become interested in your area of research?
Dr Creaven: “I did my PhD on social support many years ago. There are so many different kinds: support you actually receive, the support you provide, the support you perceive yourself to have, which isn’t necessarily what you got or will get. There’s a way of thinking about support in terms of practical support, informational support, emotional support. But as I was reading about this, I realised that a lot of what people talk about when they’re lacking support is indirectly a feeling of loneliness. If you feel you don’t belong to a group and you don’t have good support from them, that reflects not just low social support, but a feeling of loneliness. I felt like loneliness captured a lot of what was important, not everything, but a lot of what was important in terms of the emotional value of social support.”

LTRN: How do you see your research contributing to society? What impact would you like your research to have?
Dr Creaven:  “Research impact is a complex construct because some of the research we do leads to dead ends. I would like my research to bring a field forward a bit, either by closing doors to avenues we don’t need to explore anymore, or by identifying ways that are helpful to prioritise.

I’d also like the research to be impactful in terms of not being wasteful. So, if somebody is working on a project addressing a question of interest to me, that’s an opportunity for collaboration or for me not to do that research because that is already being done.”

LTRN: In your opinion, what are the most important skills needed to succeed as a researcher?
Dr Creaven: “Beside a keen interest in what you’re studying (because it’s impossible to motivate oneself to engage deeply in the literature on a topic unless something really of interest to you), I think project management skills are important. Formal training in project management is underappreciated in research, and I think it should be standard that we offer this kind of training to early career researchers because there is often have multiple projects to manage and sometimes decisions are required about what is feasible.”

LTRN: Is there something you are currently working towards achieving?
Dr Creaven: “If I were to achieve one thing, I suppose it would be that the public understands that occasional mild loneliness is a very normal experience that may resolve and that intensively-felt or chronic loneliness is what is really problematic for folks. If we could tackle loneliness without pathologizing loneliness, I think that would be amazing.

We’ve had a great increase in discourse around loneliness since COVID, and I would love to know if people consider loneliness to be stigmatised still or has the increased dialogue reduced the stigma associated with loneliness? We see for some mental health conditions, they’ve become attractive, these labels, among some communities. Loneliness is not one of these labels. I suspect there’s still some stigma attached to that, but I would love to test that because there is a lack of good quality evidence on this.”

LTRN: Can you give an insight into any interesting ongoing or upcoming projects you are involved in or will be involved in?
Dr Creaven: “One area of interest is around loneliness and stigma as we talked about already and another involves looking at loneliness within communities. We talk a lot about loneliness, as this subjective experience people have, this feeling of distress that accompanies your perception that there’s a mismatch in the quality or quantity of social relationships than what you’d like which is shaped by your assessment of what you should have. That assessment is shaped by an awful lot of different factors. What you see in your everyday life, if you see everybody else in your peer group spending a lot of time with each other, you think ‘Oh that’s the norm, that’s not what I have’.

I would love to understand how loneliness operates in groups. One potential way to look at this looks at school data where we have data from PISA for example, the Programme for International Student Assessment, that asks about loneliness at school and it asks this of every child in a classroom. That kind of data could model clusters of loneliness among different groups and see if it does cluster, if it’s very divisive, or if, in groups that are very cohesive, are those who aren’t in the group more likely to experience loneliness. I would love to look at some network models of loneliness. But it requires complete data on loneliness from groups, so that’s going to be the major challenge. It’s easier to get a person than a pair, easier to get a pair than a group of 30.”

LTRN: What was the best piece of advice offered to you?
Dr Creaven: “Research is a team sport. Depending on the model of supervision for your PhD, it might be very much one-on-one with the supervisor. You might have limited interaction with others, but I’ve seen time and time again that when you enlist others to help with different aspects, it makes it easier, smoother, more well-rounded, more impactful because you’re engaging people who might use the research early as well.”