Psychological Sense of University Membership: An Adaptation Study of the PSSM Scale for Turkish University Students

ABSTRACT

The Psychological Sense of School Membership Scale (PSSM) is a widely used instrument to assess the sense of belonging to a school among adolescents. Despite its widespread use in middle and high school students, to date no particular adaptation study has been conducted for its use among university students. For this reason, the present study conducted an adaptation of the PSSM scale for these students. Five hundred and nine students at a Turkish university voluntarily participated in the study, and the PSSM Scale's factor structure was examined by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, identifying three factors representing the students' sense of university membership with acceptable internal consistencies: acceptance by faculty members (.70), belonging (.75), and acceptance by students (.76). The internal consistency of the 18-item scale was calculated as .84. As hypothesized, the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale was also tested. The self-report sense of belonging and degree of satisfaction with the university were positively correlated with the three dimensions of the scale. Also, the scores regarding the students' intention to drop out of university along with loneliness were negatively correlated with all the dimension of the PSSM scale.

Keywords:

• acceptance
• PSSM
• school membership
• sense of belonging
• university drop-out
• university students

Author Notes

Neşe Alkan is an assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Atılım University. Her current research interests are cognitive appraisals, discrete emotions, university students' mental health, and time perception.

Acknowledgments

I would like to extend my gratitude to the following individuals for supporting this project: Yalçın Zaim, Chair to the Board of Trustees at Atılım University for encouraging this research. Melek Sak, the secretary of the Department of Psychology for organizing the data collection process; the research assistants at the Department of Psychology, Gizem Sarısoy and Elis Güngör for coding the data; all secretaries at the 33 departments within the university for arranging the timing of data collection; research assistants within the departments for administering the questionnaires; faculty members for granting permission to collection of data within their class hours; last, but not least, students for volunteering to participate.