Tackling Youth Loneliness in Urban Areas: Measuring feasibility, acceptability and benefits of a social interaction intervention

Loneliness was reported to affect around half of UK adults in 2022. Young adults may be an at-risk group for experiencing severe forms of loneliness. As loneliness can affect mental and physical health, educational achievements, unemployment, and social disparity, it has become an urgent public health problem. While interventions have been developed for tackling loneliness, most focus on older adults and suffer from conceptual and methodological limitations. There is therefore a need to develop and evaluate interventions for younger, working-age adults, and consider whether these interventions could be provided to more people on a larger scale.

Research aims

The current proposal aims to evaluate a new community-based social interaction intervention 'The Great London Friendship Project (TGLFP)'. This project focuses on social interaction offering community initiatives, online spaces for interaction, and free/low-cost social events to young and working-age adults in London.

The intervention will be evaluated in two parts. Work-package one will assess the feasibility, acceptability, and potential impact of the intervention. Work-package two will consider its' real-world implementation potential. These two work-packages will be run in parallel and provide distinctive but complementary findings.

Research design

For work-package one, 70 participants, aged 20-40 years and living in London, will be recruited through organisations in our collective networks, such as the Campaign to End Loneliness. Participants will receive either the intervention straight away (intervention group), or wait to receive the intervention after 12-weeks (control group).

To consider the impact of the intervention, questionnaires measuring loneliness, community connectedness, mental health, health-related quality of life, and use of healthcare services will be completed at the start of the intervention and at 1-week and 12-week post-intervention. At these same time-points, participants will also complete diaries on their social activities. Work-package one will confirm that participants stick with the intervention for the duration of the study and check that the intervention and procedures for data collection are acceptable (and safe) to participants. It will use data to summarise the between-group benefits on our select3ed outcome measures and costs at each time-point.

Work-package two will run alongside work-package one. Using the actual membership directories of TGLFP (with consent), researchers will track who the intervention reaches and engages. Some members will be interviewed to understand the most (and least) helpful elements of the intervention, and their level of engagement with the different activities provided by the project gathering views on how the intervention could be improved. The cost of running and attending the intervention will be calculated to assess the cost per individual.

Research application and benefits

This research will benefit young-adults experiencing loneliness. It will obtain insight on the perceived intervention benefits, and most preferred components considered by the participants to help alleviate their loneliness. Findings from this project will aid non-profit organisations and charities to consider a more personalised approach in the fight against loneliness. This will in turn provide more opportunities to social prescribers and health professionals as they seek to connect lonely individuals with sources of community support. It will also inform policymakers, media outlets, and the wider public of the benefits gained from community-based interventions for loneliness and increase awareness of the availability of helpful support. Finally, this research will also inform the academic evidence base on interventions for loneliness and inform the design of a future randomised controlled trial.