Loneliness Research Survey: 18-34 year-olds
In September 2020, I carried out a survey for the loneliness research: the “Connection Inventory”.
The full data analysis and associated report is still in production. Having said that, we can start to take a look at the initial results. As often happens with research, we are left with more questions than we started with, and I wanted to explore further what might be underpinning some of the results.
To help out, I approached NTU as part of their employability programme and recruited one of their undergrads, Georgia Lidster, to join Jade Brindley (Koa Consulting) and I on the project.
Aswell as creating an info-graphic of the headline results, when Georgia saw that young adults are the loneliest, and when I showed her the differences between the results for men compared to women, she wanted to discover more. So her project was born.
Difference between men and women aged 18-34
We combined the data for 18-24 and 25-34 year-olds so that we had enough data to compare men and women in the younger age groups and feel confident in the results.
The higher a question score (which is between 1 and 4), the more that question contributes to loneliness. When we looked at the scores for each question for men and women separately in the 18-34 age group, we noticed that for some questions, the difference between men and women stood out.
The top two questions where the average scores had the largest difference were:
How often do you feel you can find companionship when you want it?
For women the score was 2.50, for men it was 10.7% higher at 2.77
How often do you feel part of a group of friends?
For men the score was 2.60, for women it was 7.7% higher at 2.80
To find out more, and understand why this might be, we invited 3 people aged 18-34 to join Georgia to discuss. I was there as time-keeper. We recorded it to share:
A bit more about the survey
I used the 20 UCLA loneliness scale questions.
Interested in taking the survey?
Although this loneliness research is closed, you can still take the survey, get your loneliness score, and you’ll find some questions for reflection:
