Reflections on the present state of loneliness research

RS Weiss - Journal of social Behavior and Personality, 1987 - search.proquest.com
RS Weiss
Journal of social Behavior and Personality, 1987search.proquest.com
Reflections on the Present State of Loneliness Research Robert S. Weiss Work and Family
Research Unit, Downtown Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston Boston, MA 02125
The editors of this issue asked me to write something that could function as a position paper
to which others could respond. They sug-gested that I might begin by describing how I was
led to study lone-liness. When I published my small book on loneliness fourteen years ago I
had no idea it might be taken as a significant statement in a developing field, but that is what …
Reflections on the Present State of Loneliness Research Robert S. Weiss Work and Family Research Unit, Downtown Center, University of Massachusetts, Boston Boston, MA 02125 The editors of this issue asked me to write something that could function as a position paper to which others could respond. They sug-gested that I might begin by describing how I was led to study lone-liness. When I published my small book on loneliness fourteen years ago I had no idea it might be taken as a significant statement in a developing field, but that is what seems to have happened. The editors also suggested that I might review developments in the field and invited me to be as arbitrary in my responses as I pleased. I should write, in short what seemed to me to be the case, without concerning myself overmuch with due scientific caution. The invitation was an attractive one, and, of course, a flattering one, and as best as I have been able to, I have accepted it. A PERSONAL HISTORY My interest in loneliness actually was a byproduct of an investiga-tion of the nature of" primary" relationships. And that interest, in turn, stemmed from my graduate experience at Michigan. Ted Newcomb, who headed social psychology, taught that the subject matter of social psychology was interaction. And a number of sociologists, including Robert Cooley Angell, had indicated that they. believed that Cooley's concept of the primary group told us something essential about inter-action. So when I settled down to follow a single line of research, after years of tacking to the changing winds of funding, I decided to work on-interaction and, more specifically, on the nature of" primary" relation-ships. The way to start I thought, was to find-out whether different relationships that seemed to qualify for the characterization" primary" were really alike. The question I wanted to get at was," What's the nature of the primariness that these relationships presumably share?" It's possible to answer this question by definition, of course: primary relationships can be defined as close, face-to-face, affective rather than affectively-neutral, and specific to the person rather than to a category of Hojat, A, & Crandall, R.(Eds.).(1987). Loneliness: Theory, research, and applica-tions.[Special issue]. Joural of Social Behavior and Personality, 2,(2, P. 2), 1-16@ 1987 Select Press 2 LONELINESS: THEORY, RESEARCH, AND APPLICATIONS people. But defoing a class of relationships does not insure that the members of the class will share important emotional or social character-istics. I wanted to know whether primary relationships provided people with something that was not obtainable from other kinds of relation-ships and, if they did, whether the something was provided by all primary relationships. This struck me as an empirical test of the validity of the categorization. 1 I decided that a reasonable research strategy would be to learn what happened to people after the ending of a marriage and, in particular, to observe whether the provisions of marriage could be obtained from an appropriate set of less intense relationships. I was trying to work out how to obtain a sample of people whose marriages had ended when I learned that a friend was leading a discussion group for the local chapter of Parents Without Partners. He provided me with an introduction. After passing the scrutiny of a PWP research committee appointed for the occasion by reporting that I too was a parent without a partner, I became a non-participant observer of the Boston Chapter of Parents Without Partners. The leaders of the organization were never entirely clear about my non-participant status. At one point they asked me to help write the chapter by-laws …
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