Measurement equivalence between men and women in the abbreviated Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA).

Thomas V Pollet,Tamsin K Saxton,Melanie Mitchell

doi:10.5964/ijpr.v12i2.316

Abstract

Health practitioners, policy-makers, and psychologists point to legitimate concerns about the negative impact of loneliness. To help resolve such negative impact, we need to better understand the psychometric structure of loneliness. Men’s and women’s differing social roles may mean that they experience different sources of loneliness. After matching via exact matching, we compared men and women’s scores (N = 273) on the abbreviated form of the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA) using confirmatory factor analysis and measurement invariance testing. We replicated the three-factor structure of the SELSA, thereby providing further evidence for differing etiologies of family, romantic, and social loneliness. We found no good evidence for gender differences in the structure of the questionnaire answers, indicating that the SELSA can be used to further illuminate the implications of loneliness for men and women.

Highlights

Health practitioners, policy-makers, and psychologists point to legitimate concerns about the negative impact of loneliness
Social loneliness is a consequence of not having affiliative relationships such as friendships. This differentiation between social and emotional loneliness has led to the development of multidimensional measurement instruments such as the Social and Emotional Loneliness Scale for Adults (SELSA, DiTommaso & Spinner, 1993, 1997); the authors further divided emotional loneliness into family and romantic emotional loneliness, following principal component analysis of this scale
The model proved a good fit in both CFI (.922) and TLI (.906) but not in RMSEA (.105), something that could be a consequence of the relatively small sample size for our models (Kenny, Kaniskan, & McCoach, 2015)

Summary

Introduction

Policy-makers, and psychologists point to legitimate concerns about the negative impact of loneliness. We found no good evidence for gender differences in the structure of the questionnaire answers, indicating that the SELSA can be used to further illuminate the implications of loneliness for men and women. Research has shown that men attach greater value to having a romantic partner than women do (e.g., Dykstra & Fokkema, 2007), again perhaps indicating greater variation in men’s than women’s romantic loneliness Such reasoning has previously led researchers to examine the measurement invariance across genders of various loneliness scales (Buz & Pérez-Arechaederra, 2014; Maes et al, 2015), and to recommend that similar analyses should be carried out on other multidimensional loneliness scales (Maes et al, 2015). We thereby set out to uncover more about how the sources of loneliness may differ between men and women, alongside testing some of the standard psychometric properties of an established questionnaire

Methods

Results

Conclusion