Community social and place predictors of sense of community: A multilevel and longitudinal analysis

Sense of community (SOC) is empirically “unpacked ” as a multilevel construct with place and social elements. SOC has been studied primarily at the individual level despite researchers acknowledging its effects at the community level. Little attention has been given to the roles of place and place attitudes in SOC. We argue that place and social are inextricably bound, and studying the impact of the social alone on community-oriented constructs like SOC constrains our ability to adequately understand such multilevel, multifaceted phenomena. The present, cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses demonstrate that SOC is intimately related to social capital (neighboring, citizen participation, collective efficacy, informal social control), communitarianism, place attachment, community confidence, and community satisfaction. Implications for community and environmental psychology theory are discussed. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Sense of community ~SOC! has been a vitally important concept in community psy-chology since it was first defined ~Sarason, 1974!, then refined ~McMillan & Chavis, 1986! and studied extensively, as reported in part in four special issues of the Journal of Community Psychology and, most recently, an edited volume ~Fisher, Sonn, & Bishop, 2002!. SOC has also reached into the interdisciplinary realm in its tie to social capital ~Perkins, Hughey, & Speer, 2002!. As “the norms, networks, and mutual trust of ‘civil society ’ facilitating cooperative action among citizens and institutions ” ~Perkins & Long, 2002, p. 291!, social capital is argued to be intricately tied to SOC. All this is despite the fact that SOC has been a rather difficult construct to define, some eve