How Strong Is Your Sense of Community?
Not your friends - the neighbourhood, the club, the group you belong to
A sense of community is a specific feeling about a specific place or group - a neighbourhood, a club, a building, an online group you have been part of for years - and it is not the same as simply having friends there. Researchers who mapped the feeling found it is built from four separate pieces: whether the place actually meets your needs, whether you feel like you belong, whether your voice counts for anything in it, and whether you share an emotional history with the people in it. You can have any three of those without the fourth, which is usually why 'I know everyone here' and 'I feel part of this place' turn out to be different sentences.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Pick one specific community while you answer - your neighbourhood, a club, a building, an online group - and keep it in mind for all the questions.
What it measures
The four dimensions confirmed for the Brief Sense of Community Scale: needs fulfilment (the community gives you something you value), membership (you feel you belong there), influence (you can shape what happens there) and shared emotional connection (a common history with the people in it). This differs from the site's need-to-belong test, which is about your general appetite for acceptance wherever you are, and from the loneliness test, which is about whether your personal needs for closeness are met - sense of community is about your bond with one specific place or group, not about your social life in general.
Based on: Brief Sense of Community Scale (Peterson, Speer & McMillan, 2008)
Possible results
Needs fulfilment
Whether this community actually gives you something you value.
Membership
Whether you feel like you belong here, not just that you attend.
Influence
Whether your voice actually shapes what happens in this community.
Shared emotional connection
Whether you share a real history and moments with the people here.
Common questions
Is sense of community the same as having friends in a place?
Related but not the same. You can have close friends in a place while still feeling like an outsider to the group as a whole, and you can feel a strong bond to a community without being personally close to most of the people in it - influence and shared history can carry that feeling on their own.
Can you have a sense of community in an online group?
The theory was built mostly around physical neighbourhoods, but the four pieces - needs, membership, influence, shared history - translate reasonably well to sustained online groups, and later researchers have tested versions of it there. What is harder online is shared emotional connection, since it usually needs lived events, not just message threads.
Why do small towns often score higher on this than big cities?
Research comparing different-sized places has found sense of community tends to be higher in smaller towns than in larger cities, and that it is linked to life satisfaction more strongly there too. Repeated contact with the same faces makes membership and shared history easier to build - it is not that people in cities cannot form this bond, just that a city gives them fewer built-in nudges towards it.
Sources
- McMillan, D. W., & Chavis, D. M. (1986). Sense of community: A definition and theory. Journal of Community Psychology. doi:10.1002/1520-6629(198601)14:1<6::aid-jcop2290140103>3.0.co;2-i
- Peterson, N. A., Speer, P. W., & McMillan, D. W. (2008). Validation of a brief sense of community scale: Confirmation of the principal theory of sense of community. Journal of Community Psychology. doi:10.1002/jcop.20217
- Prezza, M., & Costantini, S. (1998). Sense of community and life satisfaction: investigation in three different territorial contexts. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology. doi:10.1002/(sici)1099-1298(199805/06)8:3<181::aid-casp436>3.0.co;2-4
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Brief Sense of Community Scale, with original statements rather than the published items, so scores are not comparable to published norms. The theory behind it was developed and tested mainly in neighbourhood and residential settings in the United States; applying it to a club, an online group or a workplace is a reasonable extension but not something the original validation tested directly. Your score describes your bond with one community, not your general sociability - someone can score low here and still have a full, satisfying social life built around other groups or close relationships.
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