Loneliness of parents and daughters. Is there a link between the loneliness of parents and their offspring? Psychologists J. Lobdell and D. Perlman examined this question in an article published in the Journal of Marriage and the Family (August 1986). The participants in the study were 130 female college undergraduates and their parents.
Each triad of daughter, mother, and father completed the UCLA Loneliness Scale, a 20-item questionnaire designed to assess loneliness and several variables theoretically related to loneliness, such as social accessibility to others, difficulty in making friends, and depression. Pearson product moment correlations relating a daughter's loneliness score to her parents' loneliness scores as well as other variables were calculated. The results are summarized below.
(a) Lobdell and Perlman conclude that ‘‘mother and daughter loneliness scores were (positively) significantly correlated at α = .01.'' Do you agree?
(b) Determine which, if any, of the other sample correlations are large enough to indicate (at α = .01) that linear correlation exists between the daughter's loneliness score and the variable measured.
(c) Explain why it would be dangerous to conclude that a causal relationship exists between a mother's loneliness and her daughter's loneliness.
(d) Explain why it would be dangerous to conclude that the variables with nonsignificant correlations in the table are unrelated.