Development of a Three-Factor Psychological Sense of Community Scale

Abstract

A variety of measures of sense of community have been developed, but the identification of latent factors in developed scales to measure this construct have encountered significant psychometric problems involving reliability and validity. We present a new measure called the Psychological Sense of Community Scale, which is based on 3 distinct ecological domains involving the individual, microsystem and macrosystem. We used an exploratory factor analysis to investigate our three theoretical domains involving Self (identity and importance to self), Membership (social relationships), and Entity (a group's organization and purpose). Three theoretically derived factors emerged with good measurement model fit, internal reliabilities, and convergent validity. Our study also found multiplicative over additive effects, suggesting each of the 3 domains is necessary to understand the experience of sense of community. This scale can be adapted to a variety of contexts and situations in future research.

The Relationship of Sense of Community and Trust to Hope

“…We employed a confirmatory factor analysis for the 9 sense of community items to verify the factor structure with the OH sample found in Jason, Stevens and Ram (in press). We found a three factor structure ( Entity , Membership , Self ) for the Psychological Sense of Community Scale.…”

“…The Psychological Sense of Community Scale (PSC) consists of 9 items that tap three domains including: Entity , Membership, and Self (Jason, Stevens, & Ram, in press). The Entity (Cronbach’s α = .707) domain represents organization, purpose, and effectiveness.…”

“…An important part of a recovery community is the psychological sense of community, and Jason, Stevens, and Ram (in press) have conceptualized it based on an ecological model involving three layers. At the “individual” level, people have their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, which are ingrained within the next ecological level of “membership”, an individual’s immediate network such as family, friends, coworkers, and classmates.…”

River basin management and community: the Great Ouse Basin, 1850–present

“…It is furthermore important not to assume society-type relations, for instance by uncritically adopting a rational choice approach, and consider the possibility of more communal relations. Several instruments exist to assess the sense of community, such as the Psychological Sense of Community instrument (Jason et al 2015). Such an assessment would be very useful in research on collaborative watershed partnerships (see Margerum andRobinson 2015, Cook et al 2016).…”

What are political leaders' environmental intentions? The impact of social identification processes and macro-economic conditions

“…It is more likely that his future attitudes will be affected by that experience and sensitivity because past problems influence future choices (Levine and Perkins, 1987;Chavis and Wandersman, 1990;Jason et al, 2015). The previous concrete involvement of political leaders in decision-making processes may therefore stimulate their concerns for the pressing issues that emerge during political mandate.…”