Emotional and social dimensions of loneliness, and factors associated with it

Loneliness or subjective social isolation has been described as characterizing cases in which a person feels a disagreeable or unacceptable lack of meaningful social relationships, both quantitative and qualitative. This study aimed to develop a scale that measured not only general loneliness, but also two dimensions of it, social and emotional, and to see which factors influences it, adapting two measures: The UCLA, second version (University of Loneliness California Scales, Russell et al, 1980) and the De Jong-Gierveld Loneliness Scales (De Jong-Girveld & Kamphuis, 1985). A questionnaire was constructed that included 18 items on loneliness, a measure of depression and one of social isolation. Participants were 199 subjects, 112 females, 86 males. Factorial analyses confirmed the existence of a general loneliness dimension, and of its two components, social and emotional. The results showed the importance of a social relationship net and of the presence of emotional problems (e.g.., depression) in the perception of loneliness; age and profession were instead secondary factors. Further analyses are currently being performed on a sample of 9540 subjects of all regions of Italy and several age groups who took the test on-line.