LONELINESS AMONG OLDER URBAN WIDOWS

The purpose of this tudy was to determine the extent of loneliness among older urban widows in relation to seventeen social and demographic variables. The variables examined were: age, length of marriage, length of widowhood, education, household companion, frequency of telephoning, organizational activity, sufficiency of contact with a confidant, satisfaction with visiting patterns of relatives and friends, confinement, self-rated health, occupation, income, transportation, satisfaction with housing, feelings about the past year, and time spent alone. The data were obtained by use of the Loneliness Questionnaire for Older Widows (LQ-OW) from a random sample of 80 older urban widows in Lincoln, Nebraska. The LQ-OW was adapted from the Loneliness Questionnaire (Woodward, 1967). The LQ-OW contained specific items related to the variables, questions on loneliness, and the Loneliness Inventory. The inventory included seventy-seven questions requiring the participant to indicate under what circumstances she experienced loneliness. Responses of each interviewee to the Loneliness Inventory were analyzed to derive a loneliness score, ranging from zero to five. The Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyze the data. Mean loneliness scores and standard deviations were determined for each of the categories within each of the seventeen variables. To test for significant differences in the mean loneliness scores within the various categories of each of the variables, one-way analysis of variance was employed. If a significant difference was detected, the Scheffe test of multiple comparisons was applied to determine which groups were contributing to the significance. The level of significance chosen was p (LESSTHEQ) .05 for the one-way analysis of variance, and p (LESSTHEQ) .10 for the Scheffe test. Findings of the study included: (1) The mean loneliness score of 1.03 for the widows interviewed revealed that, as a group, these women were not found to be lonely. A comparison of the mean loneliness scores of the thirteen populations studied as part of the Loneliness Research Project at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln revealed that older urban widows reported more loneliness than elderly (Woodward, 1971) or elderly in homes for the elderly (Wythers, 1974), but reported less loneliness than all the other groups studied. Those previously studied groups included: young adults (Seevers, 1972; Swanson, 1971), adolescents (Otto, 1973; Gladbach, 1976), housewives (Visser, 1971), divorced adults (Zabel, 1970), and low-income single parents (Bauermeister, 1978; Joern, 1977). (2) The four factors which significantly contributed to the loneliness scores of older urban widows were length of marriage, length of widowhood, satisfaction with amount of organizational activity, and feelings about the past year. The thirteen other variables were not found to be significantly related to the population studied. (3) Older urban widows who had been married fifty years or more were significantly more lonely than those married thirty to thirty-nine years. (4) Women widowed five years or less were found to be significantly more lonely than women widowed more than five years. (5) Older urban widows who had as much organizational activity as they wanted were significantly less lonely than those who did not have as much organizational activity as they desired. (6) Older urban widows who felt happy about the past year were significantly less lonely than those who felt that the past year had been either satisfactory or unhappy. (7) Older urban widows who were more lonely were those married fifty years or more, whose husband died within the last five years, who did not have the desired amount of organizational activity, and who had been unhappy the past year