In the face of emergency situations, such as a global pandemic, individuals rely on their personal resources, but also on community dimensions, to deal with the unprecedented changes and risks and to safeguard their well-being. The present study specifically addresses the role of individual resources and community dimensions with reference to academic communities facing COVID-19-related lockdowns and the changes that these have implied. An online questionnaire was administered to 1124 Italian University students. It detected their sense of belonging and of responsible togetherness with reference to their academic community through community dimensions, their student self-efficacy as an individual resource, and their academic stress—potentially stemming from studying in the middle of a pandemic. A multiple mediation model was been run with structural equation modeling. The results show that both the community dimensions associate with higher student self-efficacy and the sense of responsible togetherness, while also associating with lower academic stress. Moreover, student self-efficacy, in turn, associates with lower academic stress and mediates the relationships between both community dimensions and students’ academic stress levels. From these findings, the protective role that community dimensions can exert on an individual’s life becomes apparent. Building on this, further strategies should be implemented to reinforce personal and community resources in order to strengthen individuals against potentially stressful circumstances.

This contribution explores the role that the Sense of Responsible Togetherness (SoRT) exerts with reference to Participation and Sense of Community. The study was conducted on a university campus, as campuses represent places where academic and community lives go hand in hand and the community is heterogeneous. A questionnaire with the SoRT scale, the Participation scale and the Italian Scale of the Sense of Community (SISC) was administered to 130 university students. SoRT had a significant indirect effect on the students’ Participation via their Sense of Community, suggesting that the promotion of individuals’ Sense of Responsible Togetherness within their community, along with the emotional and affective bond to it, may allow us to recover symbolic and physical spaces in which participation can be fostered. A need for and significance of interventions aimed at promoting collective actions within intermediate systems (groups, educational systems, work ones, etc.).

Communication through social media characterizes modern lifestyles and relationships, including family interactions. The present study aims at deepening the role that parents’ perceptions about social media effects on family systems can exert within their family functioning, specifically referring to the relationship between collective family efficacy and open communications within family systems with adolescents. A questionnaire to detect the openness of family communications, the collective family efficacy and the perceptions about the impacts of social media on family systems was administered to 227 Italian parents who had one or more teenage children, and who use Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate with them. From the results, these perceptions emerge as a mediator in the relationship between the collective family efficacy and the openness of communications, suggesting that it is not only the actual impact of social media on family systems that matters but also parents’ perceptions about it and how much they feel able to manage their and their children’s social media use without damaging their family relationships. Thus, the need to foster parents’ positive perceptions about social media’s potential impact on their family relationships emerges. A strategy could be the promotion of knowledge on how to functionally use social media.

The central aim of the present research was to examine the psychometric properties of adapted versions of the sense of community (SOC) responsibility scale in three Italian samples. We examined the psychometric properties of three modified versions of the sense of community responsibility (SOC‐R) scale. Consistent with the original scale, exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the scale was unidimensional and exhibited excellent internal consistency. In addition, factor analyses revealed that SOC responsibility and SOC are two separate, albeit related, constructs. The results also provided evidence of the discriminant validity of SOC and SOC‐R on key outcomes. Taken together, these results provide support for the Community Experience Model, which posits that community experiences are a function of resource and responsibility components, as well as for the adaptable nature of the SOC‐R scale to the Italian context.

In recent months, Italian citizens have alternatively experienced a forced, total or partial, loss of their opportunities to go out and meet their social network or their reduction, according to the restrictions locally needed to contain the spread of the COVID-19 outbreak. The effects of these unprecedented circumstances and restrictions on their local community experience are still to be deepened. Consequently, this study investigated young citizens’ experiences of and attitudes towards their local communities of belonging after ten months of alternatively strict and partially eased restrictions. The World Café methodology was used to favor the exchange of ideas and open new viewpoints among participants. What emerged suggests that the communities of belonging may have worked as anchors to which young citizens clung as an attempt not to be overwhelmed by the disorientation brought about by the loss of their daily life (e.g., routines, life places, face-to-face sociability). On the one hand, this suggests that a renewed focus on local communities and a more involved way of living in them may stem from this tough time. On the other hand, these results point out the need for more meaningful and actively engaged people–community relationships as drivers for recovery processes under emergency circumstances.