Adolescent loneliness, self-disclosure, and private self-consciousness: A longitudinal investigation.

Abstract

Attempts to identify the causes of loneliness have recently led to at least one conclusion that seems to be widely shared by investigators in the field: The experience of loneliness is at least as much a function of the quality (e.g., intimacy, privacy) of one's social intercourse as the sheer quantity of the time spent with others.In particular, one qualitative feature of social relationships-the intimacy of self-disclosure to others-has attracted research attention.Several investigations (e.g., Berg & Peplau, 1982;Chelune, Sultan, & Williams, 1980;Solano, Batten, & Parish, 1982) using college student populations have discovered significant associations between disclosure to others and subjective feelings of loneliness.In each case, a greater intimacy in disclosure and/or a greater willingness to disclose was associated with less loneliness.Typically this association was stronger for women than men, and in some cases no relation at all was evident for men.It should also be noted that the strongest evidence for a self-disclosure-loneliness link in these investigations involved disclosure to peers and not to parents.Given this disclosure-loneliness link, one natural question becomes "What factors predispose someone to engage in intimate self-disclosure?"Actually, another focus of recent research has been on locating the antecedents of self-disclosure.In particular, attention has been given to the personality characteristics that may foster or inhibit intimate disclosure about oneself to others.This research has generally been less fruitful; one review of more than 20 years of such work concluded that a "hazy, confused portrait is all that can be distilled from two decades of investigation" (Archer, 1979). Personality, Disclosure, and Loneliness: A ModelRecently we made an attempt to incorporate personality factors, self-disclosure, and reported loneliness within a single theoretical model.We tested this model using a sample of adolescents from the United States (Franzoi & Davis, 1985).A graphic representation of this model appears in Figure 1.The endpoint of the model is the subjective state of loneliness.The variables in the model that immediately precede loneliness are self-disclosure to mother, father, and peers.On the basis of previous research (Goswick & Jones, 1982;Solano et al., 1982), it was anticipated that disclosure to parents would be unrelated to loneliness but that self-disclosure to peers would be significantly and negatively related.Preceding each of the self-disclosure variables in the model are two antecedent factors thought to be especially important in affecting disclosure to that target.The two personality factors preceding the peer-disclosure variables are private self-consciousness and perspective taking.

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