To fulfill the objectives of this project, two different studies were undertaken.  The first study used a questionnaire posted on the Internet to gather data regarding loneliness and coping strategies.  Because one of the major objectives is to examine loneliness, coping strategies and the Internet, posting the questionnaire on the Internet is a convenient way of getting participants who use the Internet.  Posting the questionnaire on the Internet is also convenient to collect data from people of different nationalities and of different ages.  In the second study the researcher collected poems and narratives that have been posted by people on the Internet.  This method was especially suited to the goal of collecting people’s subjective experiences about loneliness because the Internet is a great informal database of people’s descriptions and experiences of loneliness. 

Below is a break down of the objectives and focus questions of this project.  Objective 1 to Objective 4 refer to the four major objectives of the first study, while Objective 5 refers to the second study.

Objective 1: Loneliness and coping strategies.  This objective expands the works of Rubenstein and Shaver (1982) and Rokach and Brock (1998) into coping strategies of the lonely.  For the purposes of this project two levels of coping strategies are differentiated.  Firstly there are the individual coping strategies such as watching TV or exercising, which will be referred to as coping strategies.  Secondly, there are the more general coping strategies mentioned in previous research, which are a conglomeration of individual coping strategies, for example, sad passivity and distancing and denial.  These will be referred to as coping categories.  Therefore a group of coping strategies can constitute a coping category.  In this project, a broader set of coping strategies both mental and behavioral will be measured in an attempt to build upon and consolidate previous research by creating a new model of coping categories and analyzing its relationship to loneliness.  Questions to be addressed:

a. What coping strategies are significantly correlated with self-reported levels of loneliness?

b. What coping strategies factor with each other to form coping categories?

c.  How do the different coping categories correlate with loneliness?

Objective 2: Culture, loneliness, and coping strategies.  This objective provides cross-cultural data by collecting measures of loneliness and coping strategies from people across the globe.  Questions to be addressed:

a.  Are coping categories significantly different for people of different nationalities?

b.  Are there complementary significant differences in the level of loneliness between people of different nationalities?

Objective 3: Developmental approach to loneliness and coping strategies.  The intent of this objective is to investigate the distribution of loneliness and coping categories across age.  Questions to be addressed:

a.  Does the level of loneliness change from adolescence to adulthood?

b.  Do coping categories change from adolescence to adulthood?

Objective 4: Internet use, loneliness and coping strategies.  This objective investigates the relationship between a variety of uses of the Internet, the strength of loneliness and coping categories of the lonely.  It also examines using the Internet as a coping strategy.  Questions to be addressed include:

a.  Do lonely people use the Internet as a coping strategy for loneliness? 

b.  Is there a difference in the level of loneliness for different uses of the Internet?

c.  Are different coping categories associated with different Internet uses?

Objective 5: Phenomenological approach to loneliness and coping strategies.  This research project will extend the phenomenological database of self-descriptive categories of experiences of loneliness and coping strategies in order to understand the derived model of coping strategies and its relationship to loneliness.  This objective has three smaller objectives:

a.  To develop categories that represent collective depictions of causes and descriptions of loneliness along with coping strategies.

b.  To get the frequency of each category within all poems and narratives collected.

c.  To identify associations between categories.