Community music activity participation and loneliness among Chinese young adults living alone

Loneliness has become an increasingly salient psychological and social issue among young adults in contemporary urban China. Young adults living alone may be particularly vulnerable because of reduced daily companionship, limited opportunities for sustained social interaction, and relatively weak emotional support networks. As an accessible form of cultural and social participation embedded in community settings, community music activity may be relevant to loneliness among young adults living alone. However, the associations linking community music participation, perceived restorativeness, meaning in life, and loneliness among Chinese young adults living alone remain underexplored.

This cross-sectional study included 981 Chinese young adults living alone who had prior experience of community music activities. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to examine the association between community music activity participation and loneliness, together with indirect associations involving perceived restorativeness and meaning in life.

Among young adults living alone with prior community music participation, higher levels of community music activity participation were associated with lower loneliness. Perceived restorativeness and meaning in life were each involved in significant indirect associations between variation in community music participation and loneliness, and a serial indirect association involving perceived restorativeness and meaning in life was also observed. The standardized serial indirect association was relatively modest (-0.023) compared with the standardized total association (-0.384), while the standardized direct association remained -0.200. These effect estimates indicate that the proposed indirect pathways provide a partial rather than comprehensive statistical explanation of the association between variation in community music participation and loneliness within this participant sample.

Among Chinese young adults living alone who had prior experience of community music participation, higher participation was associated with lower loneliness, with perceived restorativeness and meaning in life involved in the observed indirect associations. The findings provide preliminary evidence that community music participation may be experienced in ways consistent with ART-related restorative dimensions and may offer a meaningful social and psychological context relevant to loneliness. However, given the cross-sectional design and the absence of an active non-musical community-participation comparison group, the findings do not establish causal processes, validate an extension of ART to community music, or demonstrate that these experiences are unique to music. Community music should therefore be regarded as a promising context for future longitudinal and intervention research rather than an established loneliness-reduction intervention.