RE1
Reduced Loneliness
Relationships
Reduced Loneliness
Loneliness is typically defined as the discrepancy between a person’s desired and actual social relationships.
Some ways loneliness can be experienced are:
- emotional loneliness – a lack of emotional attachment to someone like a close friend or partner
- social loneliness – a lack of friends to go out with, or who share our hobbies or interests
- existential loneliness – a sense of being in a room of people you know and still feeling alone
Some people experience loneliness occasionally – perhaps only at certain times, like Sundays or Christmas – while others feel lonely all the time, which is sometimes called chronic loneliness.
Key Value
A monetised social value of £8,100
This is the monetised value of 1 person reporting they are ‘hardly ever or never’ lonely from being ‘some of the time’ lonely over the course of a year.
Reducing loneliness is often the intention of interventions. The values are guided by government policy (The Green Book) and sophisticated research into the relationship between loneliness and wellbeing (measured by life satisfaction.)
The Green Book recommends that life satisfaction is expressed as £ monetised wellbeing, using the value of £13,000 for 1 WELLBY, over one year (see section on life satisfaction.) Research using national datasets can estimate the isolated impact of a change in loneliness on life satisfaction, after accounting for important controls such as age, health, socio-economics and other demographics.
This research has been done by State of Life (The WELLBY Guide), which found that even after accounting for all these other factors, a change by 1 category in a loneliness scale is worth approx. £8,100.
State of Life’s research found that even after accounting for other observable factors, a change from ‘often/always’ lonely to ‘hardly ever’/ ‘never’ lonely is associated with an increase in life satisfaction of 1.24.
Therefore this change in loneliness is worth 1.24 WELLBYs, or 1.24*£13,000 = £16,129 (rounded to £16,000). A change from ‘sometimes’ lonely to ‘hardly ever’ / ‘never’ lonely is associated with an increase in life satisfaction of 0.53 (0.53 WELLBYs) or 0.53*£13,000 = £6,850 (rounded to (£7,000).
Adjusted for inflation to 2023 prices is 8,087. Our approach to inflation adjustments is explained in our FAQs HERE
An overall rounded value of £8,100.
How to measure Reduced Loneliness
If you’re just getting started with Impact measurement, start with Bronze first. The result of a Bronze measurement is just an estimate but requires the least effort, whereas Silver, Gold or platinium give more accurate results but require more effort.
Each level has an effort-to-accuracy indicator; choose the one that’s right for you.
Bronze
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Multiply the proportion of your participants you expect to report substantially reduced loneliness by £8,100
APPLYING THE WELLBY VALUE: Multiply the proportion of your participants you expect to report substantially reduced loneliness by £8,1000
If you can’t ask people directly about their loneliness, because you’re unable to survey them, or this is a plan for a future project, then you can use this value as a proxy for a reduction in loneliness. It’s an estimate of the impact of an intervention that’s effective at moving someone from one category to the next.
Here’s an example
You plan to increase connections for elderly people in an accommodation building, by connecting them with local volunteers and running neighborhood events. You anticipate 30 residents will take part, and this will lead to a reduction in loneliness for 20 residents. (It’s important to be realistic about how many of your target group will reach the desired outcome; it’s unlikely all of them will, e.g. 20/30 = 0.67) Therefore we estimate 0.67*£8,100 = £5,427 value person. Applied to the 30 people who started means a total of £5,427*30 = £162,810 monetised social value.
Silver
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Consider what categories of loneliness you might shift people from and to. Therefore you can calculate an estimate of the overall shift, by applying the appropriate WELLBY values.
APPLYING THE WELLBY VALUE: Consider what categories your participants might realistically be starting in. Then consider what categories they might realistically shift to. Calculate the difference, which will give you a net change in each category. Multiply these net changes by the corresponding WELLBY values
This table outlines the WELLBY value which will be applied. They all come from The WELLBY Value Guide (Table 1) by State of Life and use data from Understanding Society. The coefficients indicate the difference in life satisfaction associated with being in each category. ‘Never / hardly ever’ is the base group which others are compared to, hence why the coefficient and the value are both 0. Values for the other categories are all compared to the ‘never / hardly ever’ group.
| Coefficient on Life Satisfaction | WELLBY VALUE (coefficient *£13,000 and rounded) | |
|---|---|---|
| Never / hardly ever | 0.00 | 0 |
| Some of the time | -0.53 | -£8,100 |
| Often / always | -1.24 | -£19,000 |
Here’s an example
You run a programme which aims to connect people moving to a new city. 40 residents in a new building are taking part. Realistically, most residents are doing ok. You estimate that most of the residents (75%) are lonely some of the time. The rest are split between never/ hardly over and often / always.
Through taking part in the programme you estimate there will be some shift; e.g.15% are still lonely often / always, 50% are lonely some of the time and 35% are never / hardly ever lonely.
Next you calculate the shift in each category (below). The shift in the ‘some of the time’ category is -25% * -£8,100 = -£2,025, and the shift in the ‘often / always’ group (-10%*-£19,000 = £1,900). Summing the values gives £3,900 social value per person. This can be multiplied by the number of people who take part in the choir.
| Comparison Group (Estimated %) | Intervention Group (Estimated %) | Change (I-C) | Value (to be applied) | Value of change | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Never / hardly ever | 25% | 35% | 10% | 0 | £0 |
| Some of the time | 75% | 50% | -25% | -£8,100 | £2,025 |
| Often / always | 25% | 15% | -10% | -£19,000 | £1,900 |
| TOTAL VALUE PER PERSON | £3,925 |
Gold
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
Monetised social value: Measure actual amounts of difference that reduced loneliness makes to people’s lives.
At Gold level you are looking to build on your silver estimations by engaging with the person or people affected.
Therefore, at the Gold level, you should survey users about their actual levels of wellbeing rather than using the proxy value.
There are many options for surveying people on their wellbeing.
A good starting point for questions to ask directly through primary research with your stakeholders is the Maximise Your Impact Guide. This guide covers 10 overall impact questions. For Gold level practice you would be looking to understand the question ‘what changes do people experience?’ and ‘how much of each change happened’. Questions you might want to include in your survey to uncover the outcomes they experience could include:
- What changed for you (or happened to you) as a result of our activity or programme?
- Were there any other changes?
- Did these changes lead on to anything else?
- Were the changes all positive?
- Were any of them unexpected?
- What did you want to happen?
- How did your situation/ circumstances affect your experience?
A starting point for questions related to wellbeing is to look at the What Works Centre for Wellbeing website: https://whatworkswellbeing.org/about-wellbeing/how-to-measure-wellbeing/ .
As you start to measure wellbeing directly from the people affected, one set of questions it is important to consider is the ONS4 – the national measures for subjective wellbeing in the UK which asks the following 4 questions on a scale of 0 to 10, where 0 is ‘not at all’ and 10 is ‘completely’:
- Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays?
- Overall, to what extent do you feel that the things that you do in your life are worthwhile?
- Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday?
- On a scale where 0 is ‘not at all anxious’ and 10 is ‘completely anxious’, how anxious did you feel yesterday overall?
You could also consider other data gathering activities, including direct observation, or focus groups.
How should loneliness be measured?
State of Life’s WELLBY guide made use of the dataset Understanding Society. Therefore, recommended using the loneliness question from this survey:
“How often do you feel lonely?”
[Often/always, Some of the time, Hardly ever or never]
Support in developing your Gold survey approach is available through the Measure Up partners, so please do reach out to Impact, State of Life or PRD.
Gold+
Effort
Accuracy
Monetised value:
At the Gold+ level, you are building on your Gold value calculation by assessing the value against the counterfactual, or ‘what would have happened anyway’.
To do this you should identify a control group suitable to assess in line with your intervention, in order to more accurately attribute any changes to your intervention.
You could also consider any other discount or causality elements linked to your job creation activity.
Support in developing your Gold+ counterfactual, causality and discount approach is available through the Measure Up partners, so please do reach out to Impact, State of Life or PRD.
| Value Type: | Master outcome |
What's this?
This is the type of value. Some values are outcomes, which means many different interventions might lead to them, others are specific interventions that have a set value. |
|---|---|---|
| UN SDG Categories: |
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What's this?
The UN Sustainable Development Goals are global goals adopted in 2015 for all signed up nations to achieve for us to have a sustainable global future by 2030. There are 17 Goals that address the global challenges we face, including those related to poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice. The Goals are all interconnected, and in order to leave no one behind, it is important that we achieve them all by 2030. |
| PN06/20 Categories: |
|
What's this?
PPN 06/20 Taking account of social value in the award of central government contracts introduced the Central Government Social Value Model in 2020 which all Central Government contracting authorities must use in their in scope procurements. It consists of 5 themes, 8 policy outcomes, and 24 Model Award Criteria which outline key priority areas to achieve more social value. |
Evidence
Measure Up focuses on empowering you to numerically measure the impact you’re having. We recommend that numeric reports are backed up with stories and other types of evidence to help illustrate, in human terms, the impact that’s being made on individuals.
We recommend seeing consent from one or more participants in your intervention to collect and tell their story. This should include a little background on the participant, a summing up of life before the intervention, the human impact of the intervention, and the longer term (if known) impact on the person’s life outside of, and after, the intervention.
Providing photographs, audio recordings, video interviews or even artefacts from the intervention (for example, writing, paintings, music, etc from creative interventions) can add more colour, and convey the emotional impact of interventions more directly.
In some cases it’s appropriate to anonymise or abbreviate the personal information of case study participants. No story should be published or shared without the recorded consent of the individual(s) it concerns. Individuals continue to own the rights to their stories and if they request you stop sharing the story or making it available online you should do so promptly and without need for justification.
Feedback
Measure Up is an open, collaborative and transparent. If you have any suggestions or feedback on our pragmatic, recommended approach to measuring and valuing social value, including wellbeing, economic, and fiscal impact, and effects on our environment, please get in touch so we can share and discuss this at our next Advisory Group meeting.
More help
We want to empower anyone to perform and improve their impact measurement – without needing a degree in economics.
If you need any more help, or just someone to do the legwork for you we can help signpost you to software, training and consultancy to help you get to grips with the impact you’re having.
