Europe is spending billions to fight loneliness, but the ruler is broken. Different measures give wildly different answers. Two new policy briefs explain why and what to do.
These weren't fringe studies. These were experts using established measurement tools. And yet they painted fundamentally different pictures of the same population. If the numbers can swing that much depending on which questionnaire you pick up, what are we actually tracking?, a European Union-funded effort to evaluate how loneliness is measured across all 27 EU member states.
We recently published two policy briefs—one onwe developed to address it—and I want to share what we found, because it has implications well beyond the EU.measurement challenges policy briefof being lonely. It's weaker at picking up whether someone actually lacks social relationships or faces structural barriers to connection. So a program that successfully connects isolated people might look like it failed—not because it didn't work, but because the tool can't see what changed.social support —can only be reliably compared across 5 of 27 EU countries. Use it to compare loneliness in France versus Poland, and you may be comparing apples to something that isn't even fruit. And then there's the single-question approach , which many surveys still rely on. Our data show it fails validity checks in eight countries and can't capture the multidimensional nature of loneliness at all.An elderly widow in rural Greece experiences loneliness differently from a young professional in Amsterdam or a refugee in Berlin. Current instruments—developed primarily in the United States and the Netherlands—may not capture these variations. When a measure can't"see" certain forms of loneliness, whole populations drop out of the data. And populations that don't show up in the data don't get resources. Within the same EU country, prevalence estimates from different surveys in the same year can differ by 8 percentage points or more. Try evaluating whether a national loneliness strategy is working when the numbers shift that much depending on the questionnaire., we introduce a traffic light rating system to help navigate this problem. It evaluates every loneliness measure on three dimensions: Can you compare scores across countries? Does it actually measure loneliness .is Founder and Director of the Annecy Behavioral Science Lab in France and is a Research Affiliate at the University of Oxford.Self Tests are all about you. Are you outgoing or introverted? Are you a narcissist? Does perfectionism hold you back? Find out the answers to these questions and more with Psychology Today.
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