Measuring Sense of Community Responsibility in Community-Based Prevention Coalitions: An Item Response Theory Analysis.

Research on sense of community (SOC) has traditionally been approached from a resource perspective. Recently, however, research on the experience of SOC has evolved to include a related but distinct construct of sense of community responsibility (SOC-R), or feelings of accountability for the well-being of a community. This study applied item response theory to examine the psychometric properties of a SOC-R scale used in an evaluation of community-based substance abuse prevention coalitions. Data were collected in 2017 from coalition members (analytic sample = 309) in the northeastern United States. Findings indicate that the scale was reliable, unidimensional, and functioned well, particularly at low and moderate levels of the construct. The addition of two items intended to capture higher levels of the construct improved the scale's functioning at higher levels of SOC-R. The adapted SOC-R scale was also shown to have moderately strong relationships with conceptually relevant variables, including SOC, coalition participation, number of roles performed in the coalition, and engagement in community action activities. These findings provide empirical evidence to support the reliability and validity of the SOC-R scale, and have critical implications for our conceptualization of the SOC construct, its measurement, and for the evaluation of community-based prevention interventions.

School climate and adolescent drug use: mediating effects of violence victimization in the urban high school context.

This study tested the mediating effects of violence victimization in the relationship between school climate and adolescent drug use. The hypothesized path model fit data collected from a probability sample of urban high school students (N=586) participating in an evaluation of a violence prevention program funded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Findings indicated that the lack of enforcement of school rules and the presence of unsafe places in and around the school influenced adolescent drug use directly and indirectly through their effects on violence victimization.Editors' Strategic Implications: This research confirms the importance of the environment as a contributor to violence victimization. Violence victimization is obviously of concern in its own right, but in addition, these data indicate that it also contributes to adolescent drug use. School administrators should be aware that unsafe places in schools and the failure to enforce school rules may affect such victimization and drug use.