The research on psychological sense of community leads to few firm conclusions. Among these are the idea that psychological sense of community is context specific, must be understood as involving more than individual behaviors, and should be researched at a community level. It is suggested that research on psychological sense of community could best be accomplished using a multidisciplinary approach and that the assumption that psychological sense of community is on the decline in modem American society should be empirically examined. Finally, it is suggested that in order to have a complete understanding of psychological sense of community, we need to begin to research its related construct, a sense of transcendence.In 1974, Seymour Sarason presented the psychological sense of community as a candidate for the overarching value by which community psychology should be defined. As part of this presentation, he discussed a review he had made of writings in literature, philosophy, and other fields which had identified a sense of isolation and anomie as a major problem with modem society. Twenty five years later, a review of writings on psychological sense of community yields equally interesting results. The most obvious of these results is the paucity of standardized research findings regarding this construct. This article will attempt to summarize what we have learned about the dimensions and correlates of psychological sense of community, and to describe some potentially useful approaches for further research in this field. Dimensions of Psychological Sense of CommunityTo date, there have been less than 30 published research studies which directly measure a psychological sense of community. Although there are some common methodological and theoretical threads that run through these studies, the specific findings are quite varied. For example, there seems to be little trouble getting people to agree on a general definition of psychological sense of community, yet the development of a standardized, operational definition of the construct has eluded researchers. At least five measures of the construct have been developed, and there is still a lack of agreement as to what specific dimensions make up psychological sense of community.There are two different approaches to answering this question, a factor analytic approach and a theoretical one. The factor analytic approach involves developing a measure of psychological sense of community, collecting data with the measure, and then factor analyzing that data to look for common groupings among the items. There are five reports of factor analytic studies of psychological sense of community in the literature.Glynn (1981) in one of the earliest attempts to objectively measure psychological sense of community, developed a 60 item scale. He conducted a factor analysis of the scale, and

Stories about community work in New Zealand and Scotland are presented to describe and reflect on issues central to feminist community psychology. Organizing a lesbian festival, Ingrid Huygens describes feminist processes used to equalize resources across Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (white) groups. Heather Hamerton presents her experiences as a researcher using collective memory work to reflect on adolescent experiences related to gender, ethnicity, and class. Sharon Cahill chronicles dilemmas and insights from focus groups about anger with women living in public housing in Scotland. Each story chronicles experiences related to oppression and privilege, and describes the author's emotions and reflections. Individually and collectively, the stories illustrate the potential offered by narrative methods and participatory processes for challenging inequalities and encouraging social justice.

This is the second of two special issues of AJCP on feminism and community psychology, which were developed as an initiative of the Women's Committee of the Society for Community Research and Action. The purpose of these special issues is to illustrate the commonalties shared by feminist and community approaches, ways in which each field can be used to inform the other, and the challenges and successes each field has faced in living up to its values. In Part I we presented articles that dealt with specific topics that can be usefully understood and addressed through feminist approaches. In Part II (this issue) we chose articles that investigate the role of methods in a feminist community psychology.As Mary Crawford and Ellen Kimmel write, ''we cannot unlink what we know from how we know it' ' (1999, p. 3). It is this relationship that we wish to examine in this special issue: the relationship between how we gain knowledge and the kinds of realities that knowledge is used to construct.While working to conceptualize the issues involved in a feminist community psychology, we identified seven themes that we think represent 1

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