Professor Pamela Qualter

Pamela Qualter is one of the United Kingdom’s leading scientific experts on child and adolescent loneliness. She works with the UK Government’s Tackling Loneliness Team, recently being commissioned by them to write an evidence gap report on loneliness. Previously, Pamela led the BBC Loneliness Experiment, then the world’s largest study of loneliness. Pamela is currently working on several important projects: (1) development of a new measure of loneliness for youth, and (2) two randomized control trials of two different interventions to reduce loneliness among youth. She is also working on a project that includes the development of a social media measure that offers better exploration of the role of social media in the emotional and social lives of young people.

Pamela has a consistent track record with publications exploring the phenomenon of loneliness among youth, and more recently has explored the role of place in the experience of loneliness among youth, using the socio-ecological framework. Pamela’s expertise involves large longitudinal studies, where she has explored the causes and consequences of loneliness, and the individual differences in the prospective profile of loneliness across the life-course. Pamela has also used experimental and observational methods to examine key aspects of loneliness, including impacts on health, aiming to understand what keeps people stuck in loneliness.