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	Lubben Social Network Scale	De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale
Field	Social Gerontology	Social Psychology
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1988	1985
Originator	James E. Lubben	Jenny De Jong Gierveld and Fons Kamphuis
Type	Self-report scale of social network size and engagement in older adults	Self-report questionnaire
Seminal source	Lubben, J. E. (1988). Assessing social networks among elderly populations. Family & Community Health, 11(3), 42-52.	De Jong Gierveld, J., & Kamphuis, F. (1985). The development of a Rasch-type loneliness scale. Applied Psychological Measurement, 9(4), 289-299.
Aliases	LSNS, LSNS-6, Lubben Scale, Social Network Scale for Older Adults	DJGLS, De Jong-Gierveld Scale, 11-item Loneliness Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	The Lubben Social Network Scale (LSNS) is a brief self-report instrument that gauges an older adult's level of social engagement by measuring the size of, and contact with, their family and friendship networks. Developed by James Lubben in 1988, it was designed to overcome the lack of a short, gerontology-specific tool for detecting social isolation, a condition tied to morbidity and mortality in later life. The original ten-item scale equally weights items covering network size, frequency of contact, and the presence of confiding relationships, summing them into a single index. A widely used six-item revision, the LSNS-6, retains three family and three friend items and supplies an empirically derived cutoff (a score below twelve) that flags people at risk of isolation. Because it relies only on self-reported counts rather than performance tests or clinical observation, the scale is feasible in surveys, primary care, and community screening. It has been translated into many languages and validated across diverse older populations, making it one of the most widely adopted social-isolation screens in gerontology.	The De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale is one of the most extensively used brief instruments for measuring loneliness in population surveys, clinical research, and gerontological studies. Developed by Jenny De Jong Gierveld and Fons Kamphuis in 1985, the 11-item scale (with a shorter 6-item version available) measures emotional and social dimensions of loneliness, based on the theory that loneliness arises from a discrepancy between desired and actual social relationships. The DJGLS is valued for its brevity, ease of administration, strong psychometric properties, and widespread availability in 30+ languages.