Loneliness and attitude towards it at the stage of gerontogenesis

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of loneliness of an ageing person as a multi-dimensional phenomenon. The modern Russian society still displays traditional ideas of old age as a period of inevitable losses where the problem of loneliness preserves its "top position" being a prevalent and indispensable attribute of the late ontogeny. This fact allowed us to formulate the purpose of investigation as to study the ageing person's loneliness as a multi-dimensional phenomenon including the analysis of actual loneliness feeling, lack of close communication with other people, (in) ability to stay alone and find a resource in privacy. We suppose that older adults with different levels of psychological well-being will display specificity in their attitudes to experiencing, conceiving and accepting loneliness. The research is performed on the sample group including 135 residents of Kamchatka region, aged 60-82. At the first stage of our study, with the help of the cluster analysis of C. Ryff's Psychological Well-being Scale standardized scores (adaptation by T.D. Shevelenkova & T.P. Fesenko) the respondents were divided into two groups with different levels of psychological well-being. The "Loneliness Experience Differential Questionnaire" (LEDQ) was used (Ye.N. Osin, D.A. Leontiev) to study the specificity of experiencing loneliness in cluster groups. It is essential that the authors of this questionnaire draw on the ideas of loneliness investigation taking into consideration not only its negative aspects but analyzing it as an existential factor which allows a person to appreciate privacy and creatively use loneliness as a significant self-actualization resource. The second stage of our study suggested solving the following tasks: to reveal peculiarities of attitudes towards loneliness in the groups; to carry out a correlational analysis aimed at studying interrelations between the LEDQ data and the psychological well-being components, the result of which could determine the group specificity. The research shows that loneliness experience is non-homogeneous; it displays group specificity that can manifest components relations characterizing peculiarities of ageing people's subjective perception of life events and life purpose implementation determining possibilities on the whole. Besides, the result of this research shows that, regardless of the psychological well-being level, the respondents display an emerging tendency to accept loneliness from the standpoint of actualizing its positive resource as existential evidence. The given research justifies and provides sufficient background for further studying the positive aspects of loneliness in the old age, as a resource for solving existential and spiritual problems of this age period.