Partner Correspondence in Social Time Spent With One Another and Well-Being

Abstract: Social interactions - both in-person and digital - play an important role in older adults' daily well-being. A longer social interaction duration is related to higher well-being at the individual level. Less is known about how partners' perceptions of shared time differ and whether the degree and direction of potential discrepancies in perceptions are related to well-being. We hypothesized that more time spent together would be associated with higher well-being. We examined whether over reporting shared time compared to a partner (in line with the positive illusion literature) or whether a greater accuracy in time reports between partners would be associated with elevated well-being. This study uses dyadic diary data from 137 Canadian older adults and a close other of their choice ( M age = 66.12, SD = 11.05, range 18–87 years, 70% identified as women). Correlational results show that partners differ in their reports of time spent together. In line with previous work, greater in-person time spent with others is associated with higher well-being. Contrary to our hypothesis, multilevel models show that overreporting is associated with lower well-being. Follow-up analyses show that this association is stronger with older age. Higher accuracy is not associated with higher well-being. The most significant associations lie at the between-person level, which is discussed. Our results suggest that perceiving to have more time with one’s study partner than the partner does is not as consistently associated with better well-being as we expected. Differences in time perception might further be affected by individual differences like age.