Obsessive-Compulsive Symptoms and Loneliness among Students in Kolkata: A Cross-Sectional Correlational Study

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23495665

Soham Sarma¹ and Argha Nath Bhattacharyya² (Department of Psychology, Sister Nivedita University, West Bengal¹ and Department of Statistics, Sister Nivedita University, West Bengal²)

Although there is a close relationship between loneliness and obsessive-compulsive symptomatology in young people, the relationship has only been investigated in a few Western clinical samples, and scarcely in the Indian context. The present study focused on 171 students (129 women, 42 men; age range 13-52; M = 21.75, SD = 6.34) selected from educational institutes of Kolkata, West Bengal and was conducted to study the relationship between obsessive-compulsive symptoms and loneliness. The Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory (OCI) was used to determine the presence of obsessive-compulsive symptoms, while the UCLA Loneliness Scale was used to measure the feeling of loneliness. A similarly convergent-validity measure was depression and anxiety scores. There was a strong positive association between obsessive-compulsive symptoms and loneliness, r = .337, p < .001 (Pearson correlation). The simple linear regression showed that the symptoms of the obsessive-compulsive group had a significant relationship with loneliness, F(1, 169 = 21.63, p < .001; r 2 = .113 and explained 11.3% of the variance in the score of loneliness. There were no statistically significant differences between groups in terms of obsessive-compulsive symptoms or socio-economic status using the independent-samples t-test, and no statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of loneliness, but one-way analysis of variance showed that there were statistically significant differences between the groups and their loneliness, F (2, 168) = 4.69, p = .010. The results corroborate with a weak, yet valid positive correlation between obsessive-compulsive symptomatology and loneliness in Indian students and are elaborated based on the cognitive-behavioural and social-isolation models of OCD, which are discussed in relation to implications for mental health screening and intervention within campus settings.