DEVELOPMENT OF A THREE-FACTOR PSYCHOLOGICAL SENSE OF COMMUNITY SCALE

Abstract

A variety of sense of community measures have been developed, but the identification of latent factors in developed scales to measure this construct has encountered significant psychometric problems involving reliability and validity. We present a new measure called the Psychological Sense of Community Scale, which is based on three 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 three 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.