Brief Guide to Measuring Loneliness

You can also download the questionnaire template (Word).

If you work in a charity or social enterprise and want to understand if your activities help people feel less lonely, then this guide is for you. In order to get the most of this guidance we expect you to know a little bit about evaluation and how to gather and analyse data about your project. If you’d like more help with planning your evaluation can find some advice and guidance at KnowHow Nonprofit and Better Evaluation.

Because loneliness is related to many aspects of our life, you may also want to know how your activities can improve the overall wellbeing of the people you work with. We’ll cover some recommended wellbeing measures briefly in this guide, and you can find more detail about these in our online guide on Measuring your Wellbeing Impact.

If your organisation is working to alleviate loneliness, it’s useful to know which events or triggers could push someone into feeling lonely at different points in life.
Knowing about these could help you target your efforts where they could have the biggest impact, or understand how your activities fit into the context of people’s lives:

Download the full guidance.