Examining of loneliness anxiety in emerging adulthood

In this study, it was aimed to develop a valid and reliable scale that can measure loneliness anxiety of individuals in emerging adulthood and to determine whether individuals in emerging adulthood differ significantly in terms of loneliness anxiety. The research was carried out in two stages. The working group of scale development, which is the first stage of the research, consists of 724 university students at Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University and Van Yuzuncu Yıl University. In the second stage of the research, the loneliness anxiety scale was applied together with the personal information form, and in this part of the study, the study group consisted of 553 students who were selected with the simple random sampling in the 2018-2019 academic year at the Istiklal Campus of Burdur Mehmet Akif Ersoy University. Validity and reliability studies of the scale were carried out while analyzing the data in the first stage of scale development. For content validity, the literature was examined, the items were written and expert opinion was consulted. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyzes were performed for construct validity. For the reliability of the scale, Cronbach Alpha and Spearman-Brown coefficient were calculated.. In adults, appearing in the second stage of the study, loneliness anxiety was examined among the variables. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and independent groups t-test were used in the analysis of data. When significant differences between groups were observed in the ANOVA test, LSD post hoc test was applied to determine which groups were significant. The data were analyzed with SPSS 21.0 package program. The significance level was taken as .05 in the interpretation of the findings. As a result of the study, a 40-item scale was obtained and it was observed that the total item correlations of the scale ranged between .40 and .66. The scale consists of three sub-dimensions and the variance explained by the three subdimensions is 55.6%. As a result of confirmatory factor analysis, path coefficients vary between .51 and .81. For reliability analysis, Cronbach Alpha and SpearmanBrown reliability coefficient was calculated. The cronbach alpha coefficient of the whole scale was found as .95. However, the loneliness anxiety sub-dimension in family relations .91; loneliness anxiety sub-dimension in romantic relationships .92; loneliness anxiety sub-dimension in social relations seems to be .94. The SperamanBrown coefficient of the scale is .84. In addition, significant differences were found in the loneliness anxiety scores of the students in terms of gender, age, department, parental coexistence. There is no significant difference in terms of students' romantic relationship experience, frequency of social media use, whether parents are alive or deceased, and the places where they have lived for the longest time making friends easily, number of friends, psychological trauma experience, physical trauma experience and getting psychological help.