One third of Maltese adults meet up with family every day

One third of Maltese people aged 16 and over get together with their family and relatives every day, according to a report published this week by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical agency.

According to the report ‘Meeting Up With Friends and Relatives’, which measured the frequency of getting together with family and relatives or friends, 34.7% of Maltese respondents said that they meet up with family and relatives ‘every day’, whilst 40.8% said they meet up with family ‘every week’. The remaining percentage varied between ‘once a month’ (6.6%), ‘several times a month’(9.8%), ‘not in the last 12 month’ (1.9%) and ‘at least once a year’ (6.3%).

The high frequency of Maltese meeting up with family on a daily basis places Malta as being the country in the European Union with the fourth largest frequency to meet up with friends on a daily basis.

Cyprus, Greece and Slovakia also registered a high percentage for visits with family on a daily basis, with 45.4%, 35.7% and 36.3% respectively.

Surprisingly, the report shows Malta registering relatively low statistics regarding the frequency of meeting friends, and also presented the highest percentage from all the countries to not have seen their friends ‘in the past twelve months’ with 13.9%.

“Southern Member States tended to have the highest proportions of people who saw their friends on daily or weekly basis: Greece (80%) and Cyprus (79%), followed by Croatia (72%), Portugal (70%) and Spain (69%),” the report stated, “in contrast, about 1 in 5 people in Malta (22%), Poland and Lithuania (both 20%) met friends less often than once a month or not at all in the last 12 months.”

Only 19.3% of the over 16-year-old Maltese respondents see their friends on a daily basis, whilst 30.6% said they see their friends once a week, the former seemingly higher than the EU average, and the latter seemingly lower.

The research was conducted in 2015.