David W. McMillan and David M. For several years many of us at Peabody College have participated in the evolution of a theory of community, the first conceptualization of which was presented in a working paper McMillan, of the Center for Community Studies. To support the proposed definition, McMillan focused on the literature on group cohesiveness, and we build here on that original definition. This article attempts to describe the dynamics of the sense-of-community force—to identify the various elements in the force and to describe the process by which these elements work together to produce the experience of sense of community.
Doolittle and MacDonald developed the item Sense of Community Scale SCS to probe communicative behaviors and attitudes at the community or neighborhood level of social organization.
First, there is an inverse relationship between pro-urbanism and preference for neighboring. Second, there is a direct relationship between safety and preference for neighboring. Finally, pro-urbanism decreases as perception of safety increases. Glynn administered his measure to members of three communities and hypothesized that residents of Kfar Blum, and Israeli kibbutz, would demonstrate a greater sense of community than residents of two Maryland communities.
He identified behaviors or subconcepts related to sense of community, from which items were developed, representing real and ideal characteristics. As predicted, higher real levels of sense of community were found in the kibbutz than in the two American towns. The strongest predictors of actual sense of community were a expected length of community residency, b satisfaction with the community, and c the number of neighbors one could identify by first name.
Glynn also found a positive relationship between sense of community and the ability to function competently in the community. Riger and Lavrakas studied sense of community as reflected in neighborhood attachment and found two empirically distinct but correlated factors they called social bonding and behavioral rootedness. The social bonding factor contained items concerning the ability to identify neighbors, feeling part of the neighborhood, and number of neighborhood children known to the respondent.
