THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SENSE OF COMMUNITY IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

Many urban problems are blamed on a declining sense of community. To a ssess such claims and to learn how policies affect sense of community, we need a reliable and valid measure for the construct. This paper de scribes the development and testing of an 11-item Likert scale of the sense of neighborhood community, using responses from 54 residents in three suburbs in Columbus, Ohio. One test of the scale with 100 reside nts in single-use and mixed-use areas near one another found significa ntly more sense of community in the mixed-use neighborhood. More sense of community emerged among married persons and couples with children as compared to singles and childless couples. A test with 32 renters i n neighboring apartment buildings, one with an outdoor courtyard and t he other with an interior double-loaded corridor, found significantly more sense of community in the courtyard building. Scores agreed with two other measures associated with community: number of neighbors know n by name, and number of friends in the buildings. We recommend furthe r resting in other contexts.