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To what extent does community context influence individuals' proclivity to participate in community-oriented activities and projects? In this article we utilize survey data from residents of 99 Iowa communities to conduct a multilevel analysis of voluntary participation and community action, simultaneously addressing voluntary participation at the individual level and "community action" at the community level. Additionally, we test the suggestion that community attachment may constitute a unique form of social capital. The robustness of these data allows us to overcome the obstacles that have led to the conflation of individual-and community-level attributes in many community studies. We show that community attachment and community-oriented action are determined almost entirely by individuals' characteristics rather than by the characteristics of communities, and thus do not constitute community-level phenomena, calling into question the assumptions on which certain theoretical approaches to community are based.

The Sense of Community Index (SCI) has been the most widely used measure of Psychological Sense of Community (PSC), despite abundant evidence it does not adequately measure its intended dimensions. Alternative model specifications are rarely tested beyond their initial appearance in the literature, and the use of the SCI as a 1‐dimensional scale has been promoted without testing for invariance across groups. We use a sample of students from a small Northeastern state college to test the measurement properties of the SCI and to test for invariance across semesters of college and across waves of panel data. Neither the original 1‐ or 4‐factor solutions to the SCI nor an alternative 4‐factor solution provide an adequate fit to the data. Evidence of measurement invariance was mixed, with invariance found across waves of data, but not across semesters of school. Future research using PSC should employ measures other than the SCI.

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Using survey data from a western U.S. county (N = 595), we examined how lower, middle, and higher income families negotiate a period of economic stress—the closing of a major employer in the community—through their shopping patterns. Specifically, we examined their participation in local thrift economies such as yard sales and secondhand stores. We found that lower and middle income households shop more frequently at these venues. They also tend to shop more for furniture and clothing, whereas higher income households tend to shop for antiques and trinkets. These relationships varied across the type of thrift economy examined. Overall, findings support the argument that engagement in thrift economies may constitute one mechanism families use during periods of economic stress.

To what extent does community experience differ between low context and high context societies? Prior literature theorizes that community experience consists of two separate, yet highly related concepts: community attachment, an individual’s general rootedness to a place, and community satisfaction, how well an individual’s community meets their societal needs. We test this conceptualization of community experience across communities in the US and two Southeast Asian nations: Thailand and Vietnam. We argue that Southeast Asian nations constitute “high context” societies with relatively high social integration and solidarity while the US is more individualized and less socially integrated and thus constitutes a “low context” society. Our results provide empirical evidence that individuals’ experience of community varies between low and high context societies. These results demonstrate that cultural context continues to matter in regards to the lived experience of community and researchers need to remain vigilant in accounting for such differences as they seek to examine the concept of community more broadly.

Theodori et al. (2016) take issue with our presentation of the interactional field theory of community, asserting that, according to interactional field theory, (1) community does not equate with community field; (2) community does not emerge out of the community-oriented actions of individuals; as well as making various other charges. In our reply, we refute their points, and demonstrate how Theodori et al., themselves, often provide the best evidence against their own arguments. PrefaceUnfortunately, Theodori et al.'s (2015) "Critical Response" is not a rigorous critique of the theoretical and methodological aspects of Cope et al.'s 2016 work. We forgo commenting on their abusive language and imputation of dark motives, as well as the irony of their characterization of us as having a "disparaging tone" and "resorting to the use of defamatory language." While we believe there has been a lack of good faith in this process-we were expecting a scholarly dialogue-we offer the following reply, nonetheless.