engleski

Loneliness in adolescence: the role of social strategies

Achieving mature relationships is one of the major developmental tasks during adolescence and early adulthood. In these relationships, young people seek a shared understanding, trust, acceptance, relaxation, and joy (Berndt and Perry, 1990 ; Savin-Williams and Berndt, 1990). In turn, a lack of close and meaningful social relationships has been shown to be reflected in feelings of loneliness. According to Nurmi, Salmela-Aro and Haavisto (1995) the extent to which people are successful in initiating and maintaining close relationships is influenced by the cognitive and behavioural strategies which are used. The major focus of this study was to examine the role of these social strategies in the explanation of loneliness in high school students. For the purpose of this study, which is the part of the larger project, we used only those data that were collected on high school students (N=201) from the different towns in Croatia. Loneliness was assessed by the Croatian version of UCLA Loneliness scale (Russell, Peplau and Cutrona, 1980) which is one-dimensional measure of loneliness. Social strategies in affiliative situations, success expectation, task-irrelevant behaviour, avoidance, mastery orientation, seeking social support, and pessimism were measured by The Strategy and Attribution Questionnaire (Nurmi, Salmela-Aro and Haavisto, 1995). The results show that measured social strategies play an important role in explanation of loneliness in adolescence, especially avoidance, mastery orientation and seeking social support. These finding have opened possible new area for all school professionals to include trainings of the adaptive social strategies for adolescents in their program.

loneliness; adolescence; social strategies

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