Abstract:

The problem of loneliness manifests especially heavily during youth, when the need of interpersonal relationships occupies the leading positions. Dissatisfaction of this need can be a source of feeling of loneliness and can lead to heavy consequences, such as depression, suicide, deviations. High school students spend most of their time at school, and their social status in the collective, their satisfaction with the relationships with their classmates play a significant role for their psychological wellbeing. This is further complicated with the fact that during this period the high schoolers, as a rule, have to adapt to the new classroom collective with unstable psychological climate. The purpose of the study was to determine the link between feeling of loneliness in high schoolers with their sociometric status and the measure of psychological climate in class. We hypothesized that the higher sociometric status of the high school student, the more positive is their measure of psychological climate in class and the lower their level of feeling of loneliness. 278 Russian school students aged 16 to 18 years (156 female and 122 male) took part in this study.

Measurers: UCLA Loneliness Scale, «Differential questionnaire of the experience of loneliness» (E.N. Osin and D.A. Leontiev), «Sociometry» J.L. Moreno (modified by M.R. Bityanova), Scale for assessing the psychological climate of the collective (A.N. Lutoshkin). Mathematical data processing was carried out with one way ANOVA, φ*- Fisher, Pearson's correlation coefficient.

The study revealed that the strong negative experience of loneliness is characteristic for 11% of high school students, and periodic experience of this feeling affects 38% of respondents. The high value of the average measure «experience of loneliness» on a sample shows that the majority of high schoolers view loneliness as a negative thing. At the same time 43% of males and 69% of females already can find its positive sides, but high dependence on communication, characteristic for 78%, doesn't allow to fully appreciate the loneliness as a resource for self-development. At the same time dependence on communication is higher for males (F=5.45, p=0.02), and positive loneliness is more characteristic for females (F=15.47; p=0.0001). The majority of high school students (74%) consider psychological climate in class to be favorable to varying degrees. Among those who consider the situation in the school collective to be unfavorable there are more females (φ*=2,82). As a result of the sociometric study the four groups of high school students were identified: the most high-status ones (12%), popular among classmates (34%), emotionally unattractive for classmates (44%), and non-accepted, the excluded (11%). Correlation analysis confirmed the hypothesis about the negative correlation of the level of experience of loneliness with sociometric status of high school students (r = - 0.335) and their measure of psychological climate in class (r = - 0.337). The results are used by the authors to develop a program of psychological assistance for high school students with difficulties in adaptation.

Keywords:

High school students, loneliness, sociometric status, psychological climate in classroom.