Responsiveness to self-report questions about loneliness: a comparison of mainstream and intellectual disability-specific instruments.
Use the Modified Worker Loneliness Questionnaire instead of the UCLA scale to get reliable self-reports of loneliness from adults with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McGonigle et al. (2014) compared two loneliness questionnaires. One was the popular UCLA scale. The other was a version written for people with intellectual disability.
Adults with ID answered both tools. The team watched who could answer and how well the answers matched real feelings.
What they found
The ID-friendly scale, called the MWLQ, won. People gave clearer, stronger answers with it.
The UCLA scale left many adults silent or confused. The adapted tool caught loneliness the mainstream form missed.
How this fits with other research
Kooijmans et al. (2024) asked the same question with wellbeing scales. They also saw that short words and big print made self-reports line up better with carer views.
Wormald et al. (2019) went a step further. After using the MWLQ, they found poor transport and low mood were the top loneliness drivers in older adults with ID.
Johnson et al. (1994) once showed that standard emotion scales can work for mild ID. McGonigle et al. (2014) refine that idea: tailor the wording and you get even cleaner data.
Vassos et al. (2023) screened every mental-health tool for adults with ID. Only four passed both reliability and validity checks. Their list hints that more ID-specific tools like the MWLQ are still needed.
Why it matters
If you assess social wellbeing, swap the UCLA for the MWLQ. You will spend less time prompting and more time planning real help. Better data now means better social-skills groups, transport links, or staff training later.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Print the 12-item MWLQ, enlarge the font, and pilot it with one adult client during your next preference assessment.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: We compared responsiveness to two self-report assessments of loneliness: the UCLA Loneliness Scale (UCLALS) designed for the general community, and the Modified Worker Loneliness Questionnaire (MWLQ) designed for people with intellectual disability (ID). METHODS: Participants were 56 older adults with disability - 40 individuals with ID and 16 without ID. They were individually assessed on the MWLQ and the UCLALS. The difficulty of the items in both scales was evaluated in relation to readability, features of question wording, question length and response format. RESULTS: The UCLALS was more difficult than the MWLQ on each of the difficulty dimensions assessed. There was significantly greater responsiveness to the MWLQ than the UCLALS, especially among people with ID. CONCLUSIONS: To enable as many people with ID as possible express their views on loneliness, the ID-specific MWLQ is a much better choice. However, this choice comes at the cost of ready comparison to loneliness data for the general community, which is available for widely used assessments such as the UCLALS.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2014 · doi:10.1111/jir.12024