When Daniel Russell and his colleagues at UCLA set out to create a standardized way to measure people’s loneliness in 1978, what they came up with was arguably the least fun 20-item questionnaire in history. On a four-point scale from “never” to “often,” it asked individuals: How often did they feel they had no one to turn to or talk to? How often did they feel their relationships with others were not meaningful? How often did they feel left out?
It was probably not the most painless way to learn about the inner lives of people who reported feeling bummed-out and alone. But over the course of 40 years, the UCLA Loneliness Scale has become a valuable tool in studying what’s now being called an epidemic in some Western countries. Case in point: The United Kingdom last week announced the creation of a Minister for Loneliness role within its government. Tracey Crouch, the former minister for Sport and Civil Society, will now be tasked with carrying out the prescriptions of the Jo Cox Commission on Loneliness (named for a member of Parliament who was murdered in 2016), which released a report last year declaring that over 9 million British adults reported being “often or always lonely,” approximately 15 to 20 percent of the adult population. For comparison, while research on loneliness among all adults in the U.S. is scarce, a 2012 study…
