# Interview Guide — Experiences of Loneliness

**Study title:** "Looking In From the Outside: A Qualitative Study of How Adults Experience and Make Sense of Loneliness"
**Principal Investigator:** [Student name]
**Course:** HSCI 841 — Qualitative Research Methods & Analysis
**Faculty supervisor:** Kiffer G. Card, PhD, Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University
**REB / Ethics:** SFU Research Ethics Board, Certificate # 2025s0457 (instructional dataset; participant identifiers are fully fictionalised composites for teaching purposes — no real individuals were interviewed)

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## Purpose of This Guide

This document is the semi-structured interview guide used to elicit the 20 transcripts that form the HSCI 841 capstone dataset. You will read it the way a working qualitative researcher would: it is not a script. The interviewer was instructed to follow the participant's lead, ask probes responsively, and skip questions the participant had already answered.

The guide is organised around six conceptual domains and was developed using the textbook's recommendations on semi-structured interviewing (Bernard, Wutich & Ryan, 2017, Ch. 4) and on theme-relevant probing (Ch. 5). Probes are listed in italics underneath each main question and were used flexibly.

When you analyse the transcripts as part of your capstone, you should consult this guide to understand what the interviewer was *trying* to elicit. Not all participants were asked every question; not all questions produced useful data; some of the most interesting material came from off-script tangents the interviewer followed.

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## Inclusion Criteria (as Applied During Recruitment)

- Adults aged 18 or older.
- Self-identified as having experienced loneliness in the past 12 months.
- Able to participate in an interview in English.
- Lived in British Columbia at the time of interview.

The sampling strategy was **purposive with quota elements** (Bernard, Wutich & Ryan, 2017, Ch. 3). The team sought variation across age (4 quartiles spanning 18–80+), gender (women, men, gender-diverse participants), living arrangement (alone vs. with others), and life-stage transitions (recent immigration, recent loss, recent retirement, recent caregiving role, recent relationship dissolution).

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## Opening (5 minutes)

> "Thank you for making the time to talk with me. As you know from the consent form, this is a study about how people experience loneliness. I'm interested in what it actually feels like for you, when it shows up, and what you do about it. There are no right or wrong answers — I'm not testing you, and I don't have a hypothesis I'm hoping you'll confirm. If you want to skip a question or stop, that is completely fine. Do you have any questions before we start?"

Confirm verbal consent. Confirm the recording is on. Note the date, location, and any environmental details that may matter for interpretation.

**Warm-up:**
1. Can you tell me a little about yourself — whatever you'd like me to know?
   - *Probe: living situation, work or studies, who's important in your day-to-day life.*

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## Domain 1 — Defining and Recognising Loneliness (10–15 minutes)

Goal: elicit the participant's own definition of loneliness in their own words, before any framing from the interviewer.

2. When I say the word "loneliness", what comes to mind for you?
   - *Probe: a feeling? a situation? a time of life? all of those?*
   - *Probe: is "loneliness" the word you would use yourself, or would you use something different?*

3. How do you know when you're lonely? What does it feel like in your body, in your day, in your thoughts?
   - *Probe: physical sensations, sleep, appetite, energy.*
   - *Probe: thought patterns — what kinds of thoughts come up?*

4. Is loneliness the same as being alone for you, or different?
   - *Probe: examples of being alone but not lonely; lonely but not alone.*
   - *Probe: how do you tell the difference in your own experience?*

5. Has the meaning of loneliness changed for you over your life?
   - *Probe: was it different when you were younger? After a particular event?*

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## Domain 2 — Triggers, Patterns, and Context (10–15 minutes)

Goal: understand when loneliness shows up and what the participant has noticed about its patterns.

6. Can you walk me through a recent time when you felt lonely? What was happening, what time of day, what set it off?
   - *Probe: time of day, day of week, season.*
   - *Probe: what came right before — an event, a conversation, a memory?*

7. Are there situations or times that reliably bring it on for you?
   - *Probe: weekends, holidays, late at night, after social events?*
   - *Probe: certain kinds of people or settings?*

8. Are there situations or times when you feel the opposite — connected, at ease, not lonely?
   - *Probe: what about those moments works for you?*

9. Has the pandemic, or any other major life event, changed your experience of loneliness?
   - *Probe: COVID-19, retirement, immigration, a loss, a move, a relationship ending, a child leaving home.*

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## Domain 3 — Meaning and Identity (10–15 minutes)

Goal: surface how the participant interprets their loneliness — as failure, as ordinary, as an indicator, as something else.

10. What do you think your loneliness is telling you, if anything?
    - *Probe: is it a signal? a problem to solve? a fact of life?*

11. Is there anything you feel about being lonely — beyond the loneliness itself? Embarrassment, anger, sadness, relief?
    - *Probe: stigma, shame, guilt.*
    - *Probe: do you tell other people you're lonely? Why or why not?*

12. Do you think of yourself as a lonely person, or as a person who sometimes feels lonely?
    - *Probe: identity vs. state.*
    - *Probe: how would others describe you?*

13. Has loneliness changed how you see yourself, your relationships, or what you want from life?

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## Domain 4 — Responses and Coping (10–15 minutes)

Goal: catalogue what the participant actually does when loneliness shows up, including responses they consider helpful, unhelpful, and ambivalent.

14. When loneliness shows up, what do you do?
    - *Probe: distraction, reaching out, food, alcohol, screens, exercise, work, sleep.*
    - *Probe: which of these helps in the short term? In the long term?*

15. Have you tried anything that didn't work, or that made it worse?
    - *Probe: invite honest reflection — this is often the richest material.*

16. Have you ever sought help for loneliness — from a friend, family member, doctor, counsellor, faith community, community group, or anywhere else?
    - *Probe: how did that go?*
    - *Probe: if not, what has kept you from reaching out?*

17. Is there anything that has helped you that surprised you — that you wouldn't have predicted in advance?

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## Domain 5 — Social World and Support (10 minutes)

Goal: map the participant's relational landscape without leading them to characterise it as adequate or inadequate.

18. Who are the people in your life who matter most to you right now?
    - *Probe: family, friends, neighbours, colleagues, online communities, pets.*
    - *Probe: how often are you in touch with them?*

19. Is there anyone you wish you were closer to, or anyone you wish you saw more often?
    - *Probe: what gets in the way?*

20. Have your relationships changed in recent years? In what ways?

21. What role does technology — phones, social media, video calls, online communities — play in your relationships?
    - *Probe: does it help, hurt, or both?*

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## Domain 6 — Systems, Policy, and What Would Help (5–10 minutes)

Goal: invite the participant to step back from their own experience and reflect on what might help more broadly. Often produces material relevant to public-health intervention design.

22. If you could change one thing about the way our society handles loneliness, what would it be?
    - *Probe: what would have helped you specifically?*

23. Some governments have appointed a "Minister of Loneliness" or run public campaigns about social isolation. What do you make of that?
    - *Probe: is loneliness a public-health issue, a personal one, both, neither?*

24. If a friend told you they were struggling with loneliness, what would you want them to know?

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## Closing (5 minutes)

25. Is there anything important about your experience of loneliness that I have not asked about?
26. How was it to talk about this today?
27. Is there anyone else you think it would be useful for me to talk to?
   - *(Snowball recruitment was not used in this study, but the question itself was retained as a way to close gently and to surface participant insight about whose perspectives might be missing.)*

Thank the participant. Confirm distress resources (BC Mental Health Line 310-6789, Crisis Centre 1-800-784-2433) are available on the handout you provided. Stop the recording. Note any field observations immediately.

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## Note on the Dataset

The 20 transcripts in `/term projects/HSCI_841/transcripts/` are **fully synthetic composites** developed for pedagogical use. They draw on themes documented in the published loneliness literature (Cacioppo & Patrick, 2008; Hawkley & Cacioppo, 2010; Holt-Lunstad et al., 2015; Cardona et al., 2025; Surkalim et al., 2022) and on the patterns surfaced in qualitative reviews (Mansfield et al., 2021), but no individual transcript represents a real person. Names, occupations, and biographical details are invented. The transcripts vary deliberately in length, articulateness, coherence, and the *kinds* of loneliness they portray (existential, social, romantic, cultural, situational) so that students encounter the analytic challenges they would face in a real qualitative project — including transcripts that contradict each other, transcripts where the participant resists the framing of the question, and transcripts where the most analytically interesting material is what is *not* said.

You may treat the dataset as you would any qualitative dataset — code it, count it, build conceptual models from it, run computational text-analysis on it. The capstone paper you produce should treat the data as the empirical record from which all claims must be defensible.