Community consciousness and citizen’s participation in community building: Through a development of a community consciousness scale

Abstract

The first purpose of this research was to develop a community consciousness scale and to grasp the people’s present attitude to their community in Japan. The second purpose was to examine the relationships between community consciousness and the degree of people’s participation in community building by using the developed scale. 27 items related to people’s attitude to community building activities and attachment to their community were collected to constitute the community consciousness scale. A result of factor analysis of those items showed that the community consciousness scale were composed of four factors, “solidarity”, “self-determination”, “attachment”, and “dependency on others.” The “self-determination” was a factor which had not been found out in previous researches in Japan. That the factor was found means people think citizen’s participation in decision making about community building was very important. Correlation analyses of community consciousness and people’s participation in community building showed that “solidarity”, “self-determination”, and “attachment” were positively correlated to the degree of participation in community building activities and volunteer activities. On the other hand, “dependency on others” was negatively correlated with them. These results showed that community consciousness was related to the motivation of people’s participation in community building.