Sense of Community Among Individuals in Substance Abuse Recovery

Abstract

This study assessed the psychometric properties of the Perceived Sense of Community Scale (PSCS). Psychological sense of community is a construct that has been developed primarily in the field of community psychology and deals with the feelings of connectedness, group membership, and need fulfillment that members of small groups or larger communities may have toward other members. The current research explores this concept in the evaluation of Oxford Houses, residential homes designed to provide mutual support to individuals recovering from substance abuse and dependence, through the use of the PSCS. Overall, the PSCS was a multidimensional scale exhibiting a cluster of negatively phrased items with a large number of highly loading items. Within the three-factor structure, two factors were nearly perfectly correlated, and neither sex nor race bias affected the initial formulation. However, sex and race were significant (but of small magnitude) covariates in a later sample, and highly reliable subscales were formulated with five items. Taken together, the PSCS was capable of performing as an acceptable measurement model in latent analysis.

KEYWORDS:

• sense of community
• factor analysis
• Oxford House
• substance abuse
• addiction recovery

Acknowledgments

Funding for this study was made possible in part through the National Institute on Drug Abuse grants 5F31DA16037 and R01DA13231.

The authors express gratitude to Meg Davis for supervising data collection.