Empowerment and Sense of Community: Clarifying Their Relationship in Community Organizations

Abstract

The research reported here tested the factor structure of a measure for sense of community in community organizations, and it evaluated sense of community's potential as an empowering organizational characteristic within an organizational empowerment framework. Randomly selected community organization participants (N=561) were surveyed as part of a study of a substance abuse prevention initiative located in the northeastern United States. Confirmatory factor analysis verified the putative structure of the sense of community measure tailored to community organizations. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that community organization sense of community significantly predicted intrapersonal empowerment after controlling for demographics, participation, alienation, and other empowering organizational characteristic. Findings imply that organizational sense of community should be considered as an empowering organizational characteristic in community-based health education.

Role of Ethnic Identity in Participatory Processes That Facilitate Psychological Empowerment Among Urban Youth

“…This Sense of community is a significant empowering characteristic in the literature (Hughey, Peterson, Lowe, & Oprescu, 2008). In this study, neighborhood sense of community had an indirect effect on psychological empowerment through social support and ethnic identity development.…”

Social class as moderator of the relationship between (dis)empowering processes and psychological empowerment

“…For example, many studies (e.g., Hughey, Peterson, Lowe, & Oprescu, 2008;Peterson & Reid, 2003;Zimmerman & Zahniser, 1991) have used versions of Dean's (1961) alienation scale to establish the negative relationship between the intrapersonal component of PE and alienation, confirming the hypothesis that as individuals feel more capable of exercising sociopolitical control, they become less alienated. However, no previous study has reported on the relationship between alienation and the interactional component of PE.…”

Evaluación de procesos comunitarios y análisis de redes inter-organizativas: elementos para mejorar la efectividad de las intervenciones comunitarias

“…El Sentido psicológico de comunidad (spc) constituye un proceso clave por la influencia que ejerce sobre otros procesos comunitarios como el empoderamiento (Hughey, Peterson, Lowe y Oprescu, 2008), la cohesión social (Wilkinson, 2007), la participación (Peterson y Reid, 2003;Taló, Mannarini y Rochira, 2014) y la potenciación relacional (Christens, 2011). En un trabajo reciente Ramos-Vidal y Maya-Jariego (2014) identificaron una potente asociación entre el spc y el empoderamiento psicológico en una muestra de trabajadores de organizaciones culturales; sin embargo, los autores no encontraron asociación entre ambos procesos y la participación cívica.…”