Life Satisfaction as A Determinant of Loneliness Among College Students

Abstract

Loneliness is usually defined as an unpleasant and emotionally disturbing subjective experience that occurs as response to the discrepancy between desired and achieved levels of social contact. The experience of loneliness is unpleasant and painful experience, followed by feelings of rejection from the people that we care, with simultaneous desire that they accept us and to be part of their lives. The sense of global life satisfaction stems from cumulative successes in a variety of specific situations. The measure of overall satisfaction with one's life reflects in addition to the successes experienced, the average level of mood of the person, that is, his emotional state over a long period or even throughout an individual's life. As such, overall life satisfaction is an indicator of quality of life and emotional adjustment. The main aim of this study was to examine the relationship between the life satisfaction with loneliness. The study was conducted on a sample of 200 students (82 males and 118 females) of various departments of the final year of Social Sciences and Technical Sciences at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The study applied the following instruments: The scale of general life satisfaction; The short version of UCLA loneliness scale. The results showed a negative relationship of loneliness with life satisfaction among students (r=-.515, p<.05). The obtained results show that the higher the life satisfaction of students, the less loneliness it is and vice versa. It can be concluded that students who achieved high scores on the life satisfaction scale showed less loneliness, while students who scored low on the life satisfaction scale showed higher loneliness.