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

Loneliness measurement has faced serious challenges in recent years, and recent reviews have cited indeterminate factor structures and poor construct validity as the principal causes. The field's most widely used instrument, the Revised UCLA Loneliness Scale (R-UCLA), has come under particular scrutiny. We address these challenges, firstly by clarifying the structure of the UCLA, and then by redeveloping it through a scale purification process (N = 21,589) in which we prune cross-loading items to create the UCLA-V (“UCLA-Five”). We confirm that the new scale behaves consistently across gender, geographic regions and age groups, and that it is functionally and structurally equivalent to its predecessor, but with a clear structure and improved model fit. We also derive the UCLA-V-short, the first true three-item representation of the UCLA (rparent = .92). We validate these scales in a multi-rater follow-up study (N = 910), finding that the UCLA is an isolation scale with three dimensions, one of which is loneliness.