Background Loneliness, the subjective feeling of belonging and the need for human interaction, was found to be a risk factor for cardiovascular, neurological, and psychological conditions. A need for a valid and reliable tool for the assessment of loneliness in the Arabic diaspora exists. Aim To evaluate the psychometric properties of the Arabic translation of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) Loneliness scale. Method A self‐administered questionnaire was distributed in the community and completed by participants aged over 50 years. The questionnaire included sociodemographic characteristics and the Arabic translation version of the UCLA. The translation was conducted following adequate translation methods. Cognitive debriefing and internal consistency analysis, in addition to construct validity analysis using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), were adopted. Results A total of 499 participants were included in the analysis with a mean age of 60.15 (SD = 10) years. The EFA yielded two constructs, “Emotional Loneliness” and “Social Loneliness,” with a total variance explained of 54.108% and adequate loadings for their items. The Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin measure was 0.929, and Bartlett’s test of sphericity was significant. Issues arose from Items 4 and 17 in the internal consistency and validity analysis. However, after removal, good fit indices were revealed by the CFA, a strong positive and significant interaction was seen in the correlation analysis ( r = 0.819, p < 0.001), corrected item‐total correlation ranged between 0.437 and 0.762, and the Cronbach’s alpha reached 0.909. Conclusion After modification, the Arabic UCLA was found to be a valid and reliable tool for evaluating loneliness in Arabic societies. Further evaluation needs to be done for the deleted items to better understand their contribution to the scale.
Deek et al. (Thu,) studied this question.