Development of the Social Response Biases in Loneliness for Young Adults Scale: Rooting Scale Development in Young Peoples’ Lived Experiences, 2022

Youth loneliness is common and associated with poorer health and wellbeing. Chronic loneliness could arise from a cognitive bias towards forming threatening over benign interpretations of social situations, leading to a behavioural bias favouring social withdrawal over social approach, thereby facilitating and maintaining persistent loneliness. We have developed an age-appropriate assessment tool, the Social Response Biases in Loneliness for Young Adults (SRBL-YA), for measuring these cognitive and behavioural biases. The SRBL-YA consists of 12 open-ended ambiguous loneliness-relevant scenarios that are followed by both a negative and a positive resolution to the scenario. When completing the SRBL-YA, one rates the likelihood of each of the resolutions occurring, on a 5-point Likert scale, from “extremely unlikely” to “extremely likely”.

The data presented here consists of an online survey, collected for the purpose of examining the psychometric properties of the SRBL-YA. Specifically, the factor structure of the SRBL-YA and its association with loneliness, depression, anxiety and social anxiety were examined in a sample of University students (n=416).

Confirmatory factor analysis indicated that a 7-item scale may improve upon the 12-item version, however, the reliability of both versions was somewhat low (α = 0.68-0.81). Both versions of the SRBL-YA showed convergent validity with loneliness, even when accounting for depressive, anxiety and social anxiety symptoms, but require further validation in independent samples.