William B. Davidson

The relationship between sense of community and subjective well-being: A first look

The relationship between sense of community and subjective well-being (SWB) was tested by conducting telephone interviews with three random samples in South Carolina and Alabama (ns = 151, 399, and 442). Respondents answered the 17-item Sense of Community Scale (Davidson & Cotter, 1986), a measure of three facets of SWB (happiness, worrying, and personal coping), and questions about their demographic characteristics and subjective evaluations of their community. Partial correlation coefficients were computed between sense of community and SWB, partialling out the influence of demographic and community-evaluation variables. Sense of community was significantly related to SWB in all three samples. The effects were especially pronounced for the happiness facet of SWB. Implications are drawn for theory and intervention, and recommendations are made for further research.

Sense of community and political participation

Current conceptualizations of sense of community suggest that this quality may be correlated with various forms of political participation. This notion was tested in the current study by measuring and computing relationships between sense of community and five different types of political participation: voting, campaigning, contacting political officials, working on public problems, and talking about politics. Indices of these political activities were further subdivided into those with local relevance and those with nonlocal relevance. Self-report measures of sense of community and political participation were administered by telephone interview to 546 randomly selected respondents in Birmingham, Alabama. Results showed that sense of community was significantly related to voting, to contacting officials, to working on public problems, to local and nonlocal participation, and to an index of overall political participation. The findings are discussed.

The College Persistence Questionnaire: Development and Validation of an Instrument That Predicts Student Attrition

The investigators reviewed the retention literature and developed a 53-item questionnaire and tested its validity. Component analysis of the responses of 2,022 students at four schools yielded six reliable factors: Institutional Commitment, Degree Commitment, Academic Integration, Social Integration, Support Services Satisfaction, and Academic Conscientiousness. A second study on 283 first-semester freshmen examined whether factor scores predicted which students returned for their sophomore year. Logistic regression found that three factors were statistically significant predictors of enrollment status, after controlling for high school class rank and standardized test scores: Institutional Commitment, Academic Integration, and Academic Conscientiousness. Strategies are provided for making use of scores based on differences between institutions and between individual students.

Development and Validation of Scores on a Measure of Six Academic Orientations in College Students

This article describes the development and score validation of a 36-item measure of six academic orientations in college students: structure dependence, creative expression, reading for pleasure, academic efficacy, academic apathy, and mistrust of instructors. Results from three studies indicate that the measuring instrument, the Survey of Academic Orientations (SAO), has six factorially distinct scales (Study 1) whose scores are stable across different semesters, yielding test-retest coefficients that range from .63 to .86 (Study 2). Also, each of the six scales relates in expected ways to basic personality traits, yielding validity coefficients of .30 to .69 (Study 3). Scores on the six scales are internally consistent, yielding coefficients alpha that range from .59 to .85 (Studies 1-3). Scale scores and a summative score of all 36 items, called the Adaptiveness index, are examined for their potential in predicting a variety of important student outcomes.

Using the Survey of Academic Orientations to Predict Undergraduates' Stress Levels

characteristics Relative emphasis: theory, practice, research Many universities expend substantial financial and staff resources in attempts to help students overcome academic difficulties and to alleviate adjustment problems. In spite of these efforts, approximately one half of the students who matriculate at American universities never graduate, and others find colleges to be highly stressful and threatening environments. While success cannot be guaranteed, interventions by academic advisors, faculty members, counselors, and student support staff can increase the likelihood that undergraduates will have productive and fulfilling college careers. The large student-to-staff ratios that characterize most universities make difficult the identification of individuals in greatest need of advisement and support. Many students encountering adjustment problems never come to the attention of their advisors or only do so after a series of performance or social difficulties have seriously jeopardized their chances for a successful college career. A warning system is needed for the detection of at-risk undergraduates before a student’s problems become so severe that the chance for improvement is slim. We explore the potential of the Survey of Academic Orientations (SAO) (Davidson, Beck, & Silver, 1999) as a warning indicator that students are at risk. The SAO is a brief questionnaire used to assess undergraduates’ perceptions of key college-environment features. In this study, we sought to discover if SAO profiles reliably predict the degree of stress that undergraduates experience when interacting with the academic environment. If stress-environment relationships are found through the SAO, academic advisors may be able improve their effectiveness by concentrating their energies on those students most likely to benefit from their services. In addition, SAO scores might help clarify the reasons that reactions to similar academic stressors differ among college students, and to the extent that certain orientations exert causal force toward high stress experiences, they might indicate the type of intervention most likely to be successful in helping students overcome stressinduced challenges.

PSYCHOLOGICAL SENSE OF COMMUNITY AND NEWSPAPER READERSHIP

An hypothesized association of psychological sense of community and newspaper readership was tested using telephone interviews with 1,007 randomly selected respondents in two states. The survey contained a 5-items measure of psychological sense of community and two indices of newspaper readership, amount of interest in local, state, and national news (3 items) and breadth of reading (14 items in one sample and 23 items in another). Regression analyses indicated significant relationships between scores on the Psychological Sense of Community scale and both readership indices after controlling for 5 demographic variables. Respondents with high scores on the Psychological Sense of Community scale reported a high interest in news about local, state, and national topics. Also, they claimed to read frequently many sections of their local newspaper.

A Test-Retest Policy for Introductory Psychology Courses.

the remaining 17 all but 4 could be classified as HI, ME or La. Two of the difficult 4 were HI-ME mixtures and two were ME-La mixtures. Bending the rules slightly allowed these 4 groups to be labelled as HI, HI, ME and ME. The surprising result of this analysis, then, was that a majority (21 out of 38) of the self-selected groups were of mixed ability, whereas of the 17 homogeneous groups only 3 were HI and 2 were La. Students of particularly high and low ability were distributed widely across groups to a quite remarkable extent.

Increasing the Institutional Commitment of College Students Enhanced Measurement and Test of a Nomological Model

Measurement shortcomings have hampered the understanding of institutional commitment (IC) in college students. Therefore, this study sought to (a) develop validated indices of IC and associated psychosocial attributes and (b) use these indices to test a nomological network of variables and their direct and indirect relationships to IC. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses performed upon the responses of 2,982 undergraduates at eight schools produced psychometrically desirable constructs that were then used to examine a structural equations model of IC. Results confirmed the direct effects of academic integration, social integration, and degree commitment. Also, three constructs had indirect effects: advising effectiveness, academic efficacy, and collegiate stress. These findings offer schools the opportunity to collect reliable and valid scores on key variables in the nomological network surrounding IC and provide a tool for designing efficient interventions.

Introversion–Extra Version, Tempo, and Guided Imagery

This research tested the hypotheses that (a) introverts would produce more vivid imagery than would extraverts, and (b) introverts would produce better mental imagery if the background auditory tempo was slow, and extraverts would produce better mental imagery of the background auditory tempo was fast. Participants (N = 240) were classified as introverts or extraverts and were randomly assigned one of three tempo conditions: slow, fast, or none. They were instructed to form mental images while listening individually to one of two stories Clicks (slow or fast) sounded in the background during the stories. All participants then completed detailed questionnaires about the vividness of their mental imagery. Analysis showed that introverts reported significantly more vividness in their imagery than did extraverts. The hypothesized interaction between personality and tempo was not found. Implications were drawn for therapeutic applications of mental imagery.

MULTIMETHOD EXAMINATION OF FIELD-DEPENDENCE AND IMPULSIVITY

This study examined in 94 college students the relationship between field-dependence and impulsivity with two measures of each construct. Impulsivity was assessed both as a cognitive style and as a personal lifestyle with the Matching Familiar Figures Test and the Impulsivity Scale of the Personality Research Form. Field-dependence was assessed with the Embedded Figures Test and the Articulation-of-Body-Concept Scale for Human Figure Drawings. Partial correlation coefficients were computed between the measures controlling for the effects of general intellectual ability on some measures. Results indicated that (1) the two measures of field-dependence were significantly related to each other, (2) the two measures of impulsivity were not significantly related to each other, and (3) the measures of field-dependence were, for the most part, unrelated to measures of impulsivity.