Exploring Student Loneliness in Higher Education

A Discursive Psychology Approach

Lee Oakley

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9783030356743
• eBook ISBN: 9783030356750
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book is an in-depth qualitative linguistic study of loneliness disclosures in interviews with undergraduate students in the UK. While much loneliness research has been undertaken in the areas of psychology, social policy and education, such studies have prioritised the social factors behind mental distress without paying explicit attention to the medium in which such distress is communicated and embodied (i.e. language). This monograph supplements this growing body of work by arguing for a stronger focus on the insights which linguistic analysis can provide for investigating how and why loneliness is disclosed by Higher Education students.This book is the first study to address discourses of loneliness in Higher Education specifically from a linguistic perspective, and will be of interest to education and healthcare professionals, counselling and welfare providers, and students and scholars of discourse analysis and linguistics.

© The Author(s) 2020

L. OakleyExploring Student Loneliness in Higher Educationhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35675-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Discursive Psychology and the Study of Loneliness

Lee Oakley¹

(1)

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, UK

Lee Oakley

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Introduction

Loneliness is one of the most personal, and ironically one of the most social, feelings that a person can experience. It is something which affects our sense of who we are, and our place in the society which we inhabit. It affects some for only brief moments, and still others their entire lives. It is a human universal which everyone is likely to have experienced, however briefly, at one point or another in their lives. Many scholars have variably defined this phenomenon over the years as an emotion, a feeling, a perception or even as a biological mechanism for survival. What this tells us is that loneliness is a complex process which many individuals have reflected on in different ways.

In the UK, the national press report on the state of loneliness in one demographic or another almost every week. News headlines regularly talk about in metaphorical terms as an ‘illness’ (Alberti 2018), ‘epidemic’ (Easton 2018), ‘plague’ (Gil 2014) or even a ‘disease’ (Perry 2014) affecting the population. The national attention on this issue resulted in the launch of a charitable foundation in 2017 with the aim of tackling the issue of loneliness in society. The Jo Cox Foundation was set up posthumously following the murder of the eponymous MP in the same year, and subsequently the British government revised a ministerial post so that it would incorporate loneliness. Thus Tracey Crouch, the MP for Chatham and Aylesford at the time the post was created, became ‘Minister for Sport, Civil Society and Loneliness’.

For all of the problems that it provides the individual who has lonely feelings, it is a fundamentally social problem and one which affects some members of the population in greater numbers than others. There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that one of the demographics most affected by loneliness is that of young people. A report conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in October 2018 found that of the 55,000 people who responded to an online loneliness survey, the age group which had the most lonely respondents was that of the 16- to 24-year-old group (a total of 40% of people within that category). A similar study by the Office for National Statistics also found that 5% of the general population of the UK felt lonely ‘often’ or ‘very often’, confirming that 16- to 24-year-olds considered themselves to be the most lonely of all the age groups (a demographic that includes most university-age students). This reflects a general trend across the UK for loneliness to be experienced by the very young and the very old (Victor and Yang 2013). The present study then is all about the loneliness at university. It specifically highlights the accounts of students who have felt loneliness during their studies, and how they try to make sense of those experiences within research interviews. In this particular chapter, I give a brief overview of the scholarship on loneliness. I trace its evolution from the seminal work of Weiss (1973), who considered it a ‘gnawing, chronic disease’, through to present-day psychological and sociological concerns with the topic. I then introduce the methodology of Discursive Psychology, including its key principles and theoretical aims, before demonstrating its utility in studying a topic such as loneliness. I then provide details of the study used to conduct the research for this book.

The Study of Loneliness

There has been a considerable volume of work on the study of loneliness over the past half century, from across a range of different disciplines. The work of Weiss (1973) is generally considered the starting point for most of this empirical endeavour, and in it he argues that loneliness constitutes a person’s perception of social isolation. He presents it as a subjective discrepancy between the amount of social contact one would like to have, and the amount of social interactions one actually has. This definition is intended to account for those individuals who are content with only having one or two friendships, and those who are miserable despite having very many social interactions. Loneliness is therefore not a topic that can be measured mechanically via the number of acquaintances one has, or the amount of hours of social interaction one participates in. It is also not a simple dichotomy between feeling lonely or not, as individuals may experience such feelings for a limited period of time but then not at all at other times. Weiss talks of it as a cline between loneliness and sociality, and one which has two sub-categorizations: ‘social loneliness’ and ‘emotional loneliness’. The former is meant to represent the perceived absence of common ground with one’s peers. This can be as large in scale as one’s world view, or not sharing something as minor as a hobby one enjoys and finds meaningful. The latter type (‘emotional loneliness’) is construed as a perceived absence of intimacy, be this platonic or romantic. The two types are not mutually exclusive, so one may have one, both, or neither. For example, an individual in a loving relationship may lack a sufficient social circle, whilst a gregarious person might have very many friends but still yearn for a romantic partner.

This reliance on subjective interpretations is what makes the study of loneliness a particularly difficult one. It is a sensation which can be overwhelming for those who have had experience of it, yet it is virtually invisible compared to other feelings and emotions such as anger or sadness. It is not often considered an emotion (though, see Wood 1986 for a convincing counter-argument to this), yet it is derived from the same feelings and social circumstances which constitute the basis for many ‘true’ emotions like happiness. There has been a considerable volume of work on the study of loneliness over the past half century since Weiss’ (1973) study, from across a range of different disciplines. Many early sociological studies were not as methodologically rigorous compared to the standards of today, with examples such as Seabrook (1973) and Bowskill (1977) interviewing people in their homes without recourse to either tape recorders or detailed notes. The purpose of these studies was to capture people’s everyday experiences of this feeling, and to elicit the subjective opinions the participants had for their own loneliness. There is a paradox at the heart of loneliness, though, in that one’s isolation is a problem of both individuality and sociality. As an early study by Wood (1986: 191) notes:

Loneliness is both individual and social. It is individual because it refers to the person as separated; it is social because what the person is separated from is other people. It is social because it concerns, indeed derives from our capacity for, intersubjectivity; it is individual because it involves experience which is not shared, the failure of intersubjectivity.

What Wood is saying here, then, is that loneliness has internal as well as external signals. The former comprises inner feelings, and the latter represents the visible absence of social interactions. A collection of studies edited by Peplau and Perlman (1982), now considered a key text, outlined for the first time a range of approaches and theories to the study of loneliness, something which has been updated by Heinrich and Gullone (2006). More recently it has been suggested that loneliness has an evolutionary basis. Work conducted by John Cacioppo and colleagues has argued for a theory of loneliness that does not label it an emotion, but rather a mechanism for survivability in humans (e.g. Cacioppo and Cacioppo 2012; Cacioppo et al. 2014). They state that loneliness should be treated in the same way as hunger or thirst, as a drive to redress a deficit in something the body needs for it to survive, be it water, food, or social contact.

Such research has primarily treated it as a topic for psychological investigation, whereby successive generations of scholars have attempted to account for, categorize, and measure the incidence of loneliness within the general population. To this end, a self-reporting closed-class questionnaire was developed at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978, with two subsequent revisions by Russell et al. (1980) and Russell (1996). The original ‘UCLA Scale of Loneliness’ (Russell et al. 1978) was designed as a means of quantifying the issue in order to gauge the scale of the problem. Over the course of the three versions, there have been numerous demographics studied in relation to loneliness, including college students, nurses, teachers, the elderly and so on. The most recent version of the scale is reproduced below. Participants are instructed to rank their responses to each of the questions on a scale of 1–4. At the end, the numerical scores are tallied to produce a final number. Some questions (which contain asterisks) have a reversed focus on sociability, and thus the scoring for these is also reversed. The higher the final total number, the more lonely the participant is considered to be. The beginning of each question asks participants how regularly they (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The UCLA Scale of Loneliness (Version 3)—after Russell (1996: 23)

It has been claimed that the UCLA Scale has been used in approximately 80% of all empirical studies of loneliness (Goossens et al. 2014), though this number is derived from a much earlier paper (Oshagan and Allen 1992) and therefore cannot be verified. This said, almost all of the psychological papers cited in this book draw upon at least one version of the scale, suggesting that it continues to be influential to this day.

Loneliness in Higher Education

The past twenty years have seen a growing interest in the reported incidence of loneliness within higher education. For many students, their arrival at university marks a transformational time in their live...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Discursive Psychology and the Study of Loneliness
• 2. Disclosures of Loneliness
• 3. Accounting for Constraints
• 4. Invoking Social Credentials
• 5. Talking Up Temporal Contrasts
• 6. Conclusions
• Back Matter