Society & Culture - Posted by Mike Ferlazzo-Iowa State on Monday, January 3, 2011 12:31 - 7 Comments 
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(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5) Loading ...Many adults are chronically lonely
Daniel Russell, who helped developed a scale to measure loneliness, says surveys suggest loneliness may be increasing, due in part to a generational effect, "with individuals who grew up during the Depression being less likely to admit to feelings of loneliness," he says. "By contrast, the Baby Boom generation would be more willing to admit to such feelings. That may indeed be the case, and at least partly responsible for the increasing levels of loneliness that we have seen." (Credit: iStockphoto)
IOWA STATE (US) — A national survey suggests that for many older Americans being lonely is more than a passing feeling. It’s a way of life.
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The text of this article by Futurity is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivatives License.
Among a sample of 3,012 people ages 45 and above, 35 percent were found to be “chronically lonely,” according to the UCLA Loneliness Scale. Results are reported in AARP The Magazine.
Husband and wife researchers Daniel Russell, an Iowa State University professor of human development and family studies, and Carolyn Cutrona, professor and chair of psychology, developed the scale. They’ve been studying loneliness since the early 1980s when they were researchers at UCLA.
The scale determines a subject’s loneliness by scoring his or her responses—made on a four-point scale—to a series of 20 questions. Russell has been reluctant to permit the complete scale to be published.
“They [researchers and journalists] always want to publish the scale, but I’ve tried to keep it out of the magazines out of a concern that it may affect its validity,” Russell says. “My thinking is that if it’s already been out there and everyone’s seen it, then they’re going to know immediately what you’re trying to measure and so forth.
“There’s also another interesting problem,” he adds. “And that’s if you go putting this measure out there in a magazine and you tell people, ‘If you get a score of 60, then you’re really lonely,’ I don’t know how that may go over with somebody filling it out who is sitting there in their house all alone and socially isolated.”
According to Russell, a 2005 phone survey of Iowans used a short, 10-item version of the UCLA Loneliness Scale. That Iowa Family Survey found Iowans to be less lonely than the recent national AARP sample—with the percentage of chronically lonely individuals over 45 years of age among the Iowa sample being 32.9 percent.
“Is this due to living in Iowa?” Russell asks. “Another explanation may simply be that loneliness is increasing over time.”
Russell provided evidence of his second theory, reporting that in the Iowa Family Survey, the average level of loneliness among those over 65 years of age was 37.22, whereas the average level of loneliness in the 1986 study he and Cutrona conducted in Iowa’s Linn County was 31.51.
“I have always felt that the low level of loneliness we found in the Linn County study may have reflected a generational effect, with individuals who grew up during the Depression being less likely to admit to feelings of loneliness,” Russell says.
“By contrast, the Baby Boom generation would be more willing to admit to such feelings. That may indeed be the case, and at least partly responsible for the increasing levels of loneliness that we have seen.”
He also says there is a great misunderstanding about loneliness.
“Part of what I try to do is prove that loneliness is not simply depression,” Russell says. “It can lead to depression—and many measures on depression have a question about loneliness—but it’s clearly distinct from depression. Way back when I was in graduate school, a fellow graduate student did his dissertation on this issue and he described it this way: ‘Lonely people are dissatisfied with their social relationships. Depressed people are dissatisfied with everything in their lives.’”
Russell points out that loneliness is not affected by the quantity of relationships, but rather the expectation an individual has for those relationships. For that reason, fond memories of friends and relatives in holidays past can lead to people feeling lonelier during the holiday season.
More news from Iowa State University: www.news.iastate.edu/
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7 Comments
e green
Sushanta
I wonder how ‘the researchers’ would respond to e green ‘s comment
patathomas
Bias? What bias?
Subjectivity? What subjectivity?
20 questions? Sweeping conclusions based on 20 questions?
Generational effect? Other factors measured or not, such as household composition, involvement in community and family, proximity to family and friends, etc,?
Give me a break.
ikpe
Yes Guy! this highlight is quite in order. Just as i said elswhere there are going to be far reaching global changes and as the US is the icon of the contemporary global culture these trends will have the envisaged implications. It will be a global transformation and major shift from what I call cosmetic institutions to realistic ones.
as Latino natives of this nations true history! WE Shall remain! They cannot kill us all or remove us w modern day Obama Latino Ethnic Cleansing across this nation. Latino American Progressive party 2012 Vote
We can also expect one other trend — that we will be less divided by what is external and visible amongst us (race, gender, age) and more divided by what is internal to each of us, such as conservative and liberal views of how we care for those in need. The question is whether we as a nation will expect leaders to be harmonizer and work for the betterment of all sides, or whether we will look for polarizing leaders who argue for one view to the exclusion of all others.
Jill
See Stephen Harper – there IS a reason for a Conservative govenment to keep the long census. It helps corporations develop marketing plans. Not to mention the little detail of policymakers and lawmakers being able to to develop working plans targeted to help their constituents. Not to mention academic studies.
These researchers come up with their undisclosed “scale” based on what? Their personal opinion of the relationships people “should” have? No basis for any standard is disclosed (in addition to the study not being disclosed).
Perhaps these researchers should consider that the “rampant loneliness” they “found” is nothing more than the realization, by many people as they get older, that they would rather read a book or an article in the Wall Street Journal than go to a “social” gathering and discuss the latest ailment of someone’s dog. And they no longer feel the social pressure of young adults to get out and find a mate or “be cool” (or, at least, as cool as the researchers imagine they should be).
The researchers seem to have no particular basis for defining persons as “lonely”, i.e. their relationships as “inadequate”, if the expectations of the persons are satisfied by their relationships – even if they don’t meet the researchers personal standard – how can people be defined as “lonely”, other than in the researchers rather judgmental minds?
Between this type of study on “loneliness”, the studies on depression and stress, and those on memory deficits, there are apparently virtually no mentally healthy people left in society, according to the academic discipline of Psychology.
In my opinion, the discipline is going off the deep end – just as it did over the inane ideas of Freud a few decades back.