The correlation of self-esteem and loneliness among university students

Loneliness is usually defined as an unpleasant and emotionally disturbing subjective experience that occurs as response to the discrepancy between desired and achieved levels of social contact. The experience of loneliness is unpleasant and painful experience, followed by feelings of rejection from the people that we care, with simultaneous desire that they accept us and to be part of their lives. Self-esteem can be defined as self-evaluation by which an individual reflects an attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance of himself. Self-esteem is a value and emotional component of the notion of self. Because we live with other people who also value us, self-esteem depends in large part on how others value us.The main goal of the research was to determine the relationship between self-esteem and loneliness in students. The research was conducted on a sample of 200 students (82 males and 118 females) from different departments of the final years of social and technical sciences at the University of Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegowina. The following instruments were used in the study: the Rosenberg self-esteem scale and the Short version of the UCLA loneliness scale. The relationship between self-esteem (as measured by the RSE scale) and loneliness (measured on the eponymous scale) was investigated using the Spearman correlation coefficient. The mean negative correlation between these two variables was calculated (ro= -. 494, p <.05) with high levels of self-esteem accompanied by a low level of loneliness. The results showed a negative association of loneliness with students' self-esteem. The level of loneliness is lower in people who have a higher level of self-esteem, that is, people with low self-esteem have a higher level of loneliness.