Project - Research Proposal Example

Loneliness and Gender: Impact on Depression among Freshmen January 30, My proposal intends to examine if loneliness and gender can impact health through increasing depression. This study is related to the seed article because of its investigation on how other people perceive lonely individuals and because of the role of gender in these perceptions. It is different from this article because it focuses on the psychological effects of loneliness among first-year college students. The independent variables for the proposed study are loneliness (two levels: lonely and non-lonely) and gender (two levels: female and male).

The dependent variable is depression. The hypotheses are the following: Hypothesis 1: Lonely people will score higher on depression than non-lonely people.Hypothesis 2: Male/female people who are lonely will be more depressed than non-lonely males/females.Hypothesis 3: Female people who are lonely will score higher on depression than male participants who are also lonely. These hypotheses are based on the idea of loneliness as affecting people’s social conditions, although they focus on loneliness’ health effects on freshmen students.

Hypothesis 1 is related to the seed article in terms of being concerned of how lonely people feel, but it goes beyond the former by determining the correlation between loneliness and depression. It is also different from the seed article because this study measures the health conditions of lonely people, unlike the seed article that measures the perceptions of other people regarding lonely people. The seed article already mentioned how loneliness affected depression (Lau & Gruen, 1992, p. 188), which emphasizes the importance of studying loneliness.

I want to focus on this connection between loneliness and depressive symptoms to also help underline that loneliness can have short-term and long-term health effects. Hypothesis 2 builds on the seed article because of the examination on how gender affects loneliness. It expands on this article because it determines if gender can have different impacts on depression. Knowing which gender has higher depression risks can help allocate resources for educating and helping lonely people.Hypothesis 3 grows out from the seed article because it showed that gender can impact perceptions of loneliness.

My study is different from this article because the latter believes that perceptions of loneliness stigmatize males more than females, while I believe that females who are lonely feel more depressed than males because females may be depressed of not being as socially adjusted as other females. Though there is a male stereotype for being sociable, I think that there is a stronger female stereotype to be sociable, especially among young people (Ladd & Ettekal, 2013), so it is possible that unsociable females may bear stronger social stigma that can affect their health more than lonely males.

All variables will be measured through self-report surveys. Loneliness will be measured through the UCLA Loneliness Scale which evaluates observations of social isolation and loneliness (Russell, 1996, as cited in Jaremka et al., 2013, p. 1312). Depressive symptoms will be measured through the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression (CES-D) Scale (Jaremka et al., 2013, p. 1312). These measures are different from the seed article that measured the perceptions of other people regarding lonely people.

ReferencesJaremka, L.M., Fagundes, C.P., Glaser, R., Bennett, J.M., Malarkey, W.B., & Kiecolt-Glaser, J.K. (2013). Loneliness predicts pain, depression, and fatigue: Understanding the role of immune dysregulation. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 38(8), 1310-1317.Ladd, G.W., & Ettekal, I. (2013). Peer-related loneliness across early to late adolescence: Normative trends, intra-individual trajectories, and links with depressive symptoms. Journal of Adolescence, 36(6), 1269-1282.Lau, S., & Gruen, G.E. (1992). The social stigma of loneliness: Effect of target persons and perceivers sex.

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 18(2), 182-189.