Reclassifying the UCLA ‘Loneliness’ Scales: How the UCLA has obscured the distinction between loneliness and social disconnection

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Maher, Paddy; Dragostinov, Yavor; Stewart, Ross David; Hawkley, Louise and Cooper, Andrew. 2025. Reclassifying the UCLA ‘Loneliness’ Scales: How the UCLA has obscured the distinction between loneliness and social disconnection. PsyArXiv Preprints, [Article] (Submitted)

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Official URL: https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/52cz4_v1

Abstract or Description

Loneliness research has been built on the idea that loneliness is simultaneously a subjective emotional state and a perceived deficit in social connections. This ambiguity has been entrenched by the field's most widely used instrument, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA), which is a composite scale, equally capturing both of these distinct, separable constructs. This has exaggerated the true link between loneliness and measures of social networks. While a three-item loneliness scale has been derived from the UCLA, references to it as a short-form UCLA scale are inaccurate and misleading. The UCLA thus has no valid three-item short-forms. Through a brute-force item selection process (N = 21,589) and a multi-rater validation study (N = 352), we reevaluate the R-UCLA and develop a short version. We present the UCLA-3.5 (“I feel isolated from others”; “There are people I can turn to”; “I have a lot in common with the people around me”) as a psychometrically robust and efficient composite loneliness-disconnection scale that captures the R-UCLA’s multidimensionality. This work clarifies the loneliness literature by offering a distinction between the experience of loneliness and social network appraisals.

Item Type:

Article

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/52cz4_v1

Additional Information:

License: CC0 1.0 Universal

Funding: The authors are grateful for £2,000 seed funding received from Wrexham University to support this project.

Data Access Statement:

The UK Touch Test dataset is available from the UK Data Service at: https://reshare.ukdataservice.ac.uk/854471/. All R scripts required to analyse these data and reproduce our results are available from OSF, at: https://osf.io/uqnt5/.

Keywords:

loneliness, UCLA, short loneliness scales, assessment

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Psychology

Dates: