Sense of Community Index

What is the Sense of Community Index?

The Sense of Community Index (SCI) is a scale designed to measure an individual's psychological sense of community. It is comprised of 24 items where the participant rates how they perceive and feel about a group they belong to. The SCI is the most common psychometric tool used to measure a sense of community.

Community psychology posits that community is a social construct comprised of group membership, influence, fulfilment of needs, and shared emotional connection. This theory of community is the foundational basis of the SCI, which has a four-factor structure mapping onto these four tenets of community.

Following confirmatory factor analysis studies, the revised version of the Sense of Community Index (SCI-2) was created to improve sub scale reliability. The SCI-2 is a validated and versatile social scientific resource with applications in both territorial communities (e.g., neighborhoods) and relational communities (e.g., workplaces).

The ability to measure a group or society's positive sense of community - including closeness, belonging, a feeling that community members matter, personal investment in the group and shared participation—is hugely valuable in the social sciences. It allows researchers insight into human relations and social interaction within successful communities. This can then inform community treatment programs and other practical interventions for improving community togetherness and relationships.

How to use our Sense of Community Index template

The Sense of Community Index is best used for research. It also requires you to sign up for it on the Sense of Community website. After that, here's what you should do:

Step 1: Access the template

Access the free SCI-2 template by clicking "Use template," which opens it on the Carepatron app's template editor. There, you can customize it and fill it digitally or as a hard copy. You can also get a non-customizable, ready-to-use PDF by clicking download.

Step 2: Distribute

Ensure you indicate a specific community (e.g. a company, neighborhood, sports team) at the top of the SCI-2 before you distribute it. (Do not use "your community" as the referent). Distribute the questionnaire to the community members.

Step 3: Complete the questionnaire

Instruct the participants to complete the questionnaire. They will first be prompted to indicate how much they care about feeling a sense of community (on a scale from 1-6). They will then be required to respond to 24 statements by indicating how much each one reflects their feelings towards their community. Only one answer may be selected for each question.

Step 4: Record the results

Ensure the results are stored securely for future research or reference. It may also be prudent to record average scores for a group.

Scoring

There are four possible answers to each of the 24 questions, each with a corresponding number of points: Not at all = 0, Somewhat = 1, Mostly = 2, Completely = 3. Sum answers from questions 1 to 24 to get a total sense of community score.

Questions on the SCI-2 are can be divided into four sub scales:

• Membership - feelings of belonging, togetherness, and relatedness, members exert energy on behalf of the group and invest time in the group
• Influence - a sense of mattering or being important to the group
• Reinforcement/integration and fulfilment of needs - the extent to which one feels their needs are met by the group
• Emotional connection - feelings of shared history or beliefs, feeling connected to other members

A score for each can be obtained by summing the questions that make up that sub scale:

• Reinforcement of Needs = Q1 + Q2 + Q3 + Q4 + Q5 + Q6
• Membership = Q7 + Q8 + Q9 + Q10 + Q11 + Q12
• Influence = Q13 + Q14 + Q15 + Q16 + Q17 + Q18
• Shared Emotional Connection = Q19 + Q20 + Q21 + Q22 + Q23 + Q24

(Note that the very first question, 'how important is it to you to feel a sense of community with other community members?' is a for validation purposes only, and should not be included in the scoring.)

Next steps after using the SCI-2

After getting back the results and calculating the scores, you need to use it. Here's how:

Analyse the data

Typically, the SCI-2 is administered to a whole group (e.g. a professional company) or a sample of the group in order to gain insight into how a community collectively perceives itself. After administering the SCI-2, collate and analyse the data to identify any limitations in the community sense of togetherness or belonging.

Interventions

Improving community relationships and belonging requires practical steps. When a sense of community is lacking, identify specifically which sub scales of the SCI are weak, and conduct further research to identify how and why this is occurring.

Use this information to guide interventions. For example, if employees returns low scores on the 'fulfilment of needs' scale, they may feel low trust in their employers or colleagues. A company could then take practical steps to address this.