ESRA 2027 sessions by theme
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Loneliness and the life-course - what and how to measure? |
| Coordinator 1 | Mrs Lisa Joanne Klasen (SHARE BERLIN Institute (SBI)) |
| Coordinator 2 | Mr Alexander Tobias Schumacher (SHARE BERLIN Institute (SBI)) |
| Coordinator 3 | Dr Anne Berngruber (Deutsches Jugendinstitut (DJI)) |
| Coordinator 4 | Dr Arne Bethmann (SHARE BERLIN Institute (SBI)) |
Session Details
Loneliness has become a prominent topic across the social sciences and in political and societal discourse, given its impact at the individual and societal level. The trend was amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic, when countermeasures curtailed opportunities for social interaction and loneliness levels rose across societies. Conceptual and measurement aspects, however, have received less attention.
Conceptually, distinct aspects of the construct are worth disentangling: the structural, objective dimension of social isolation versus loneliness as a subjective, perceived state, and general loneliness versus the differentiated perspectives of emotional and social loneliness.
Regarding assessment, several approaches compete: indirect versus direct measures, single-item versus multi-item scales, and, among the latter, the established De Jong Gierveld and UCLA-3 scales as well as the ONS harmonized loneliness measure (three UCLA-derived indirect items plus one direct question). Which aspects of loneliness do these instruments capture? How do they compare, in which survey contexts are they most appropriate, and how many response categories are needed? What about alternative approaches?
Tracking loneliness over time is equally central, whether to monitor societal trends or to identify the events and lingering factors that shape it across an individual’s life. This raises the question of comparability: is loneliness the same construct as people age, and can it be captured with the same instruments for children and for the very old? Does UCLA-3 function for young children? Is the De Jong Gierveld scale applicable to centenarians? We welcome contributions spanning the full life course, studies taking institutional contexts into account — kindergarten, school, retirement homes — and work interrogating invariance directly, including across countries, languages, and survey modes.
We hope to foster debate on the current state of the art in measuring loneliness over the life course: what works well, and where room remains for methodological development.
