How strongly your community feels like yours — a place where you belong, are heard, find what you need and feel bound to the people in it.
The Brief Sense of Community Scale (Peterson, Speer & McMillan, 2008) is a validated eight-item measure of psychological sense of community, built directly on McMillan & Chavis's (1986) four-element theory of community — membership, influence, integration and fulfilment of needs, and shared emotional connection. First validated with a community sample of US city residents, the sense-of-community family of measures has since been adapted for schools, workplaces and online communities, and research links a stronger sense of community to wellbeing and civic participation. 'Community' here is whichever one matters most to you — your street, town, club, congregation or online world. Where you lean on each dimension is a self-description, not a test score. (Brief Sense of Community Scale (Peterson, Speer & McMillan, 2008))