Reclassifying the UCLA ‘Loneliness’ Scales: How the UCLA has obscured the distinction between loneliness and social disconnection

Loneliness research has been built on the idea that loneliness is simultaneously a subjective emotional state and a perceived deficit in social connections. This ambiguity has been entrenched by the field's most widely used instrument, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA), which is a composite scale, equally capturing both of these distinct, separable constructs. This has exaggerated the true link between loneliness and measures of social networks. While a three-item loneliness scale has been derived from the UCLA, references to it as a short-form UCLA scale are inaccurate and misleading. The UCLA thus has no valid three-item short-forms. Through a brute-force item selection process (N = 21,589) and a multi-rater validation study (N = 352), we reevaluate the R-UCLA and develop a short version. We present the UCLA-3.5 (“I feel isolated from others”; “There are people I can turn to”; “I have a lot in common with the people around me”) as a psychometrically robust and efficient composite loneliness-disconnection scale that captures the R-UCLA’s multidimensionality. This work clarifies the loneliness literature by offering a distinction between the experience of loneliness and social network appraisals.