Psychological Sense Of Community Of City Resident: Concept, Structure And Measurement

Psychological sense of community(PSOC)is a popular topic in the study of western community psychology,while no systemic study on PSOC has been carried out domestically.On the basis of literature research and positivism,the purpose of the research is to give a definition of PSOC,put forward the structure and make up a psychological sense of community scale to assess Chinese city residents' PSOC level.Nearly thousands of community residents were involved in interviews,text analysis and questionnaire survey and the results were mainly as follows:(1)Psychological sense of community refers to psychological environment which community members depends on to survive and develoP,and attitudinal experience of mutual influence.The concept contains three factors of collective recognition(cognitive factor),mutual attachment(emotional factor)and inheritance trend(readiness for action). Collective identity refers to community members' recognition and acceptance of collective oriented value.Mutual attachment refers to community members' emotional experience of mutual communication, co-operation and mutual influence.Inheritance trend refers to community members' expectation and readiness state of community succession, development and prosperity.(2)Psychological sense of community scale contains 19 items,6 items included in the subscale of collective recognition,7items included in the subscale of mutual attachment and 6 items included in the subscale of inheritance trend.The results show the internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alphas)is.879,half-split reliability is.868,and two-week test-retest reliability is.749.The analysis of dimension-full scale shows that subscales have good consistency with full scale.The result of confirmatory factor analysis indicates the scale has good validity of the concept.The test of criterion sample indicates empirical validity arrives at established standard.(3)The scale adopts T score with mean score 50 and standard deviation 10.High PSOC is defined to those who get scores above 1 SD (T score is above 60)and low PSOC is defined to those who get scores below 1 SD(T score is below 40).(4)Residents' PSOC score is above the middle level.There is great variety among residents' PSOC score of all ages,while age developing trend is apparent on the whole.Residents' PSOC has significant differences on variables of education,length of residency,number of children,own of house and belief,though no significant gender difference is found.The results of regression analysis indicate among eight variables, only loneliness enters into regression equation and has significant prediction on PSOC.Path analysis shows PSOC both has significant direct effect and indirect effect on residents' loneliness,while three subscales of collective recognition,mutual attachment and inheritance trend have no significant direct effect and indirect effect on loneliness and sense of subject well-being.Finally,the creation of theory,methods,subjective inclination of encoding,and appropriateness of sampling were discussed to help the follow-up study.