How many ways are there to measure social connection, disconnection, and loneliness? Far more than you might expect, and that makes measurement a grand challenge for research and for policy.
In an ongoing systematic review of more than 80,000 articles on social connection, LONELY-EU is mapping how researchers have tried to capture these experiences. The picture so far is one of strong fragmentation.
The team has screened more than 2,720 distinct measures, made up of 32,444 individual items. These measures agree surprisingly little. They differ in the constructs they claim to capture, in their response formats and time frames, and in the populations they target, often with little conceptual overlap.
This variety has consequences. It affects whether and how studies can be compared and evidence combined, and it makes the path from research to policy harder.
The review also feeds into the EU Social Isolation and Loneliness (SIL) Index that LONELY-EU is developing, together with 357 in-depth interviews in eight countries. Our Policy Brief 8, What Europe’s Social Connection Numbers Hide, explains what these findings mean for policy.
