Browsing by Author "Eestilä, Sari Tuuli Kristiina"

In recent years, loneliness has been talked about in the media relatively often. There are multiple studies about harmfulness of loneliness for one's health and safety both nationally and internationally. The aim of this master's thesis is to find out how the loneliness discourse has changed in the Finnish parliamentary discussions and why. The main research questions are: How often has loneliness been brought up between the years 1980 and 2019 in the Finnish governmental documents and which actor groups and themes can be identified in the discussion. In addition, the thesis will look at by whom have the actor groups and themes been brought up. The data of this thesis are governmental documents: governmental proposals, expert opinions and debate initiatives. The used methods are both quantitative and qualitative. In the first part, the data is analyzed using quantitative content analysis, more specifically categorization. By processing the data this way, one gets an answer to the first two research questions: how often has loneliness been brought up and which actor groups and themes can be identified in the discussion. In the second part of the thesis, the findings are analyzed using narrative analysis as a qualitative method. This reveals what kind of narratives are linked to findings and in which context and by whom they have been brought up. In the third part of the thesis, there is a brief review on the wider Finnish (socio)political environment and how it might have affected the results. The most important findings in this thesis are that the loneliness discussion has increased and peaked only in the 2010s. The most often mentioned group is child loneliness. Loneliness as a subjective feeling is relatively new topic in the parliamentary discussions. It started to emerge only in the 2000s and peaked after 2015. In the 2000s, organizations used the prevention of loneliness as an argument to get funding or to justify the importance of their work. This proves that in the 2000s loneliness had become something that is considered harmful. Security is a new viewpoint in the loneliness discussion: in 2010s it has started to emerge in the media as a security problem, partly because of school shootings and radical lone operators. In the 2020, the Finnish Security and Intelligence Service (Supo) mentions that lone operators are among the biggest security threats in Finland. While the demands towards the state has increased, loneliness in the Parliament has always been talked about through something else, or as a "side effect" of another problem.