Sentido de comunidad en el barrio: una propuesta para su medición

Sense of community is a subject rounded by a lot of discussions about. Nowadays, lifestyles, consumption practices and cultural changes in global cities make difficult to define sense of community. Traditional notions seem not to agree with people's perceptions and ways of connect with each other in the city. It is necessary to review theoretical framework, to conduct exploratory studies and to propose assessment scales in order to understand and explain the nature of the communities in contemporary cities. Hiernaux (2001) and Krause (2001) propose to reconsider community and sense of community notions and redefine it in an operational and useful way. A minimal structure for sense of community has been defined by Krause (2001) which includes belonging, interconnection and common culture. Considering Krause's proposal and results of a previous exploratory study in Mexico City a Likert scale was developed. The main purpose is to contribute to evaluation of sense of community in the city. The original 39 items scale was applied to a sample of 202 Mexico City's in habitants to obtain its psychometrical validation, 50% were woman and 50% were men from 143 different neighborhoods. A proper analysis took place to learn about items discriminative power, reliability and valid factorial structure. Subsequently a Confirmatory Factor Analysis was conducted to verify if the structure obtained from the Principal Component Analysis was correct, and a good fit was achieved (df = 26, x2 = 37.57, p = .066; CFI = .981; RMSEA = .045), the sample for the confirmatory factor analysis was of 218 Mexico City's inhabitants, 50% were woman and 50% were men from 90 different neighborhoods. Final scale is constitute for 9 items structured in a single factor with a reliability index of α= .85. Neighborhood's sense of community scale is a brief, with criteria validity and culturally outstanding scale.