| Project Supervisor | Delia Fuhrmann |
| Institution & Department | King’s College London – Psychology |
| Research Area | RA1: Global Health Innovation |
| Project Start Date | End of June 2026 – flexible start date offered. |
| Project Duration | 3 months |
| Application Deadline | 4th June 2026 |
| Working Pattern | Full-time (5 days per week over 3 months) |
| Working Arrangements | Hybrid |
| Most members of the KCL and QMUL team work in the office 2-3 days a week coinciding with in-person lab meetings. We would encourage the student to discuss their working arrangements and needs with the supervisors ahead of the internship. | |
| How to Apply | View Guidance Here |
Project Description
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Loneliness is a global health problem. Recent data suggest that young people, defined by the World Health Organization as ages 10 to 24 years, are particularly prone to experiencing high levels of loneliness. In the UK, 45% of 10-15-year-olds and 59% of 16-24-year-olds reported feeling lonely “some of the time” or “often” (Office for National Statistics, 2018). In some young people, loneliness can become persistent and harmful, associated trans-diagnostically, with a range of mental health conditions including depression, psychosis and eating disorders. Physical and cognitive health are also affected. Addressing youth loneliness is therefore an urgent governmental priority.
However, to tackle youth loneliness, we need to be able to reliably and consistently measure. Without reliable and valid measurements, we cannot research and understand it, develop interventions to alleviate it, assess the efficacy of these interventions, and direct support to those who most need it. Yet our current measures of youth loneliness show major limitations. Many of these were developed for adults and do not capture the authentic loneliness experiences of young people. Perhaps because of this, the items of many frequently used loneliness measures tend to show age-related measurement variance. That is, young people respond differently to the items of the scale than adults, bringing into question the validity of using it to capture the loneliness experience. Although loneliness scales specifically for youth are currently under development, in the meantime, the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has issued recommendations for measuring loneliness to harmonise measurement in loneliness research and policy (ONS, 2018).
The aim of this research project will be to explore the measurement invariance of a commonly-used youth loneliness scale in youth across age groups, but also across different sub-groups within youth (e.g., gender, socioeconomic status). Using data already collected as part of the Youth Loneliness Scale project, the student will run and compare congeneric and tau-equivalent measurement models, triangulating three analytic approaches: model comparison approaches, alignment testing, and, for age as a continuous stratifier, Local Structural Equation Modelling (LSEM). These data will help to address a much needed research gap in the evidence-base of loneliness measures contributing ultimately to understanding the experiences of loneliness across youth.
More details on the wider Youth Loneliness Scale project can be found here.
Internship Details
With training and supervision, the student will help to run and test models with varying assumptions around the way that items of a well-used measure of loneliness cohere and relate to one another – across different ages (within youth) and personal characteristics (gender, socioeconomic status). Testing these various models will enable us to explore the utility of using an adult-developed measure to capture youth loneliness.
In addition, the student will contribute to wider dissemination activities relating to the promotion of our new measure of youth loneliness. Funded through a grant by UKRI and as part of the Adolescent Mental Health and Developing Mind programme, the Youth Loneliness Scale was co-developed with young people through a series of methodological development steps. Our protocol is here.
The team are currently working on writing up the final output for publication but in the meantime, we hope to prepare dissemination materials for non-academic stakeholders including writing a short policy brief for colleagues in the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and in the Department of Education. We also want to prepare video materials to showcase the measure to clinical practitioners. The student will contribute to these activities.
Anticipated Benefits for the Student
Through this internship, the student will develop the following doctoral-level research and transferable skills:
- Psychometric evaluation and analysis: running and testing models using different statistical methods; learning/implementing code in R for analysis.
- Science communication and dissemination strategies and skills: The student would be involved in helping to create materials to promote and disseminate the new Youth Loneliness Scale.
- Working as part of two research units: The Youth Loneliness Scale project is based at King’s College London and Queen Mary University of London. The student would be encouraged to attend research lab meetings at both and interact with and contribute to ongoing research activities such as journal clubs, writing retreats, seminars.
- There will also be the opportunity to contribute as deemed useful/of interest in other research projects and/or to attend relevant methodological / personal development training opportunities.
Skills, Experience and Knowledge Requirements
Basic quantitative analysis; experience with R.