Measuring sense of community in the military: cross-cultural evidence for the validity of the brief sense of community scale and its underlying theory

This article presents a German Sense of Community (SOC) scale for use in military settings. The scale is based on the translation and field-testing of an existing U.S.-based measure of neighborhood SOC (Peterson, Speer, & McMillan, 2008). The methodological intricacies underlying cross-cultural scale development are highlighted, as are the strategies used to overcome them. Administered in a navy context (n = 270), the newly-developed German measure improves the psychometric credentials of the existing scale by confirming the principal theory of SOC and its applicability across borders and contexts. Future research is encouraged to build on the strength and flexibility of the existing U.S. instrument for further cross-cultural scale development, thus enabling SOC theory to attain its international potential.