Lubben Social Network Scale

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.