For Young People

What is Loneliness? 

Loneliness is more than just being alone. It’s the feeling of being disconnected, even when surrounded by people. When we’re unhappy with the depth or number of our social connections, we can experience loneliness.

It is often stigmatized and misunderstood. Everyone feels lonely from time to time. Feeling lonely can motivate us to get to know ourselves and reach out to people. For some of us, however, loneliness can feel inescapable and distressing. To be able to provide support when needed, we must better understand experiences of loneliness. 

Loneliness and Young People:

Loneliness can be experienced by anyone, at any age, however, young people are one of the groups particularly likely to be affected by loneliness. UK reports found that 45% of 10–15-year-olds and 59% of 16-24-year-olds report feeling lonely “often”.

Young people’s sensitivity to loneliness may be reflective of the many internal and external transitions they experience during this period, such as leaving school. Therefore, it’s important to have a way to measure how lonely a young person may be feeling so that we can better understand loneliness and support young people.

Working With Young People:

For our new measure to accurately capture the experiences of young people, we will involve young people at every stage of the project:

• Young Person Co-Investigators have shaped and will shape the project at all stages of development (e.g., collecting data and contributing to the scientific papers we write).

• Young Person Co-Researchers contribute to the research in shorter bursts (e.g., writing content for this website).

• Our Young Peoples Advisory Group meets regularly to give us feedback on the project (e.g., giving advice on how to reach more young people for data collection).

• Our research participants share their experiences of loneliness and social connection helping to generate, refine, and evaluate items for the questionnaire.

Do you want to get involved?

We'd love to hear from you! Please get in touch with Jennifer Lau.