Development of Taiwan Teacher's Sense of Community Scale— From Perspective of Workplace Spirituality

Abstract

This research aims to develop Taiwan Teacher's Sense of Community Scale, because there are rare(is no) sense of community scales for teacher in Taiwan. In process of developing the scale, we had three procedures: 1. Literature analysis: the relevant theoretical foundation includes sociology, sociological psychology, and etc., this research adopted workplace spirituality, since sense of community is one dimension in some workplace spirituality scales, and it can be further divided into sense of connection, sense of support, and sense of having the same purposes. Therefore, our research takes sense of community as the variable and the just mentioned three points as the dimensions. After literature analysis, 14 items were proposed. 2. Reviewed by experts: Four experts provided opinions for us to modify the initial 14 items from theoretical and practical perspectives, and the results are--8 items remained the same, and 6 were modified. 3. CFA: The items were further inspected by three models. (1) The initial model: The 14 items of the three factors were edited into a Likert five-point-scale, and first-order CFA model to confirm their fit, and the result showed that the overall model was fair (N=235), although one item's factor loading was only .36, yet it was deleted. (2) Modification Model: The model after deleting the item was called modification model with fair results after our confirmation. Further analysis was conducted for the basic fit of the modification model, and it is found that there were no offending estimates, and the fit of the internal structure was acceptable (including the individual reliability, the composite reliability, the average variance extraction). 3. The review model: Due to that the model was modified, another batch of the samples was investigated (N= 378) for confirmation of the model's stability. Since the overall results were fit; up to now, the 13 items of the three factors' Sense of Community Scale for the teachers was established, including sense of connection (4 items), sense of support (5 items), and sense of common purposes (4 items).