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Campaign to End Loneliness Measurement Tool

General information

Description

This is a short 3-item tool, co-designed with older people and service providers. It uses positive and sensitive wording so is easy to use.

Strengths

  • Positive language about a sensitive issue: The particular strength of this tool is that it is written in language which is non-intrusive and unlikely to cause any embarrassment or distress.
  • Practical: It is therefore a very practical resource for organisations in the field to use
    in their face-to-face work with older people.
  • Co-designed: It has been designed with a number of different people and organisations, to try and ensure it is appropriate for a ranges of contexts.
  • Length: It has been kept as short as possible and is easy to score.
  • Validity: The tool has undergone academic tests to ensure it is valid and reliable.
Limitations
  • Only using positive language: The use of only positive worded questions could also lead to respondents under-reporting their loneliness, although we cannot test for this.
  • Not a screening tool: Finally, we strongly advise organisations not to use these questions as a “screening tool” to establish eligibility to their services. It has not been designed for this purpose and may therefore give misleading results.

 

Questions

This tool contains the following statements:
1. I am content with my friendships and relationships
2. I have enough people I feel comfortable asking for help at any time
3. My relationships are as satisfying as I would want them to be

The response options are:
Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Neutral / Agree / Strongly Agree

In order to avoid a ‘response set’ – where people give the same answer to a question almost by rote, it is important to alternate the direction of answers. E.g. for questions 1 and 3 you start with the ‘Strongly Disagree’ end of the scale and for question 2 you start with ‘Strongly Agree’.

Asking all three of these questions together produces the most reliable information on people’s experience of loneliness.

Source

Campaign to End Loneliness Measurement Tool

Validation details

Campaign to End Loneliness Measurement Tool

Implementation

Cost / Terms of Use

Free (No permission required)

Instructions and Scoring

In order to score somebody’s answers, their responses should be coded as follows:
Response –  Score
Strongly disagree – 4
Disagree – 3
Neutral – 2
Agree – 1
Strongly agree – 0
The scores for each individual question need to be added together. This gives a possible range
of scores from 0 to 12, which can be read as follows:
Least lonely 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 Most lonely
A score of 0 or 3 can be said to be unlikely to be experiencing any sense of loneliness,
whereas anyone with a score of 10 or 12 is likely to be experiencing the most intense degree of loneliness.
Scores in-between these two extremes are on a spectrum of feelings of loneliness; however it is not possible to say that each point on the scale represents an equal increase or decrease in the degree of loneliness someone might be feeling.
The main purpose of this tool is to measure the change that happens as a result of an intervention to address loneliness. The key thing to focus on is how people’s scores change over time.

Benchmarking

We don’t currently have benchmarking information for this measure.