Hello! And a question on measuring the quality of a connection

Hi Uptrusters! Sara here, joining for the conversations (debates? connections? community?) and because I’ve been frothing to see the inside of this platform ever since Jordan told me about it 🤤.

Since I imagine the best way to say hello here is to start an interesting conversation, here’s something I’ve been noodling on lately.

Right now I’m doing a bunch of research on loneliness and social isolation (two different things, as it turns out!) to write an article on How to make friends for the publication Clearer Thinking, which i think does the best independent psychological research and tool development of anywhere I know. In case you want more context for this post, here is the draft of the first half of the article, posted on my Substack while I’m working on it. https://authenticrevolutionary.substack.com/p/how-to-make-friends-part-1-inner?r=34w9f

There are a few research questions that have come up for me as I do this, areas of study that I think could be more explored and would be exciting to look at if we ever have Ph.Ds or grant funding for our field. If this topic interests people lmk and I’ll post more of the questions.

Here’s one I’ve been thinking on. There are a number of studies that look at how social connectedness, whether strong or weak-tie, affects health and happiness.

However, the metrics they use to ASSESS social connectedness seem…maybe incomplete, to me? For instance, I was reading a study this week on how the quality of conversations affects happiness and a sense of connection (study available here, if you want to read the results: https://psycnet.apa.org/manuscript/2019-62902-001.pdf)

The metrics they used to assess quality of connection were:
- Self-disclosure
- Depth of conversation (rated from superficial to substantive)
- Liking of the other person
- Prior knowledge of the other person

So here’s my question. What other metrics, if any, do you think would be pertinent to assessing the quality of a connection?