SCI-2 vs. BSCS SOC Research and Measurement Discuss SCI-2 vs. BSCS in the forums; Has the SCI-2 been tested again since the Chavis, Lee, and Acosta presentation? Is there a published CFA of that data available? Has there been any effort to reduce the ...

[J_Flaherty]

Has the SCI-2 been tested again since the Chavis, Lee, and Acosta presentation? Is there a published CFA of that data available? Has there been any effort to reduce the number of questions?

Does anyone have an opinion as to what would be a better route for future research--the SCI-2 or Peterson, Speer, and McMillan's 8-item Brief Sense of Community Scale (2008. J. of Community Psychology 36[1]:61-73). I'm looking at working with sense of community in multiple surveys and trying to integrate PSOC and the community attachment ideas community sociologists generally work with.

[dchavis]

Hi!

Thank you for your interest. There has been no attempt nor will there be an authorized attempt to reduce the items (SCI-2 is copyrighted). The SCI-2 is a theoretically derived instrument, not statistically derived like the BSCS and other attempts to develop a shorter version of the original SCI. I understand as well as anyone that 24 questions is a lot of real estate on a questionnaire, but we found that key elements get lost each time it got reanalyzed by someone wanting a shorter version they could claim as a discovery. Why is that? Simple, each time you run a PCA or other factor analysis, in fact any statistical test, the result are idiosyncratic to that sample. As we recognized early on, different components of the sense of community theory will have more or less relevance to a certain community (but not irrelevant). This can affect affect the generalizability of the results of factor analysis and other statistical efforts based on one or two samples of respondents. Both the SCI and SCI-2 were were derived from the results of numerous studies.

The SCI-2 was developed and tested to address psychometric concerns with the SCI and advances in the theoretical understanding of sense of community (SOC) since the SCI was developed. It has been exceptionally high reliability and the reports of its validity have matched our expectation as it is being used internationally and has been translated into several languages. Our goal this time is to develop a standardized instrument so that we can learn more about SOC. I believe that past past efforts that revised or shortened the SCI based on statistical techniques has greatly undermined our ability to advance our understanding of SOC. There is no scientific basis to believe a shorter set of questions are better than a longer one.

We are currently trying to identify all the studies that are using the SCI-2 and will have that report available on this site by the end of June. So far we have identified 30 users of the SCI-2 (currently using or in progress). One of the fatalities of the need by some to re-design the SCI based on statistical analysis is that results are frequently difficult to compare. Our current effort is to standardized the questionnaire and then make results of studies available to other users for the purpose of benchmarking and exchange of knowledge.

Hope this helps. I would love to hear other opinions on this.

David

[J_Flaherty]

Thanks for the response.

You wouldn't happen to know if the SCI-2 has been translated into Indonesian or Javanese, would you?

I read Peterson, Speer, and McMillan as explaining that the BSCS is theory-derived, unlike others that are as you described--idiosyncratic findings from single samples that are apparantly never replicated (e.g., Long and Perkins 2003 JCP paper). Regardless, I'm not terribly impressed with Peterson et al.'s scale as some of the indicators seem too similar.

Still, I'm curious as to whether the SCI-2 (or the BSCS) have been consistently providing a good fit to the 4-factor solution that comes out of the theory, or if this is still to be established. I'm particularly interested in working with the underlying dimensions rather than just global SOC itself, so I'm interested in knowing whether the presence of those dimensions is typically evidenced in confirmatory factor analysis (not PCA or exploratory factor analysis--I'm not interested in creating my own idiosyncratic scale!!). Perhaps this will be clear with the report you'll be posting in June.

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