Conceptualizing and Operationalizing SENSE OF BELONGING
Baumeister and Leary (1995) describe and provide evidence for what they believe to be
a fundamental psychological human need – the need to belong (or belongingness need).
I would like to develop a self-report measure that will provide me with information about
the degree to which my participants’ belongingness needs are met/satisfied. I will call
the construct this measure to assess the Sense of Belonging. In order to create the
measure, I first need a conceptual definition. The conceptual definition needs to be
detailed enough to guide me as I write a large number of items that I will then evaluate
for inclusion in the measure. The definition should not include information that is not
important for completing my task of creating items.
1. Please write a conceptual definition for Sense of Belonging, as described above.
Because the idea for this construct stems from Baumeister and Leary’s (1995)
paper, you will first need to read their paper. There is no single correct way to
answer this question, but your answer should provide me with enough information
to start writing items for the measure. And because time is a valuable resource,
irrelevant information will result in a less favorable evaluation of your answer.
There are several measures of belongingness, as well as other constructs that seem to
tap the construct of sense of belongingness, though they are called something different
(remember the Jingle Jangle fallacy?). Because it is important to make sure that a
suitable measure does not already exists before developing a new measure, I found
and need to evaluate a few measures. Specifically, The General Belongingness Scale
(Malone, Pillow, & Osman, 2012) and the Relatedness subscale of the Basic Needs
Satisfaction in General Scale (Johnston & Finney, 2010).
2. Please tell me how well the two measures capture Sense of Belongingness, based
on the conceptual definition you came up with.
Data quality is affected by many things, including the quality of the instruments we use
for measurement. So beyond evaluating how well the above measures capture our
construct based on our conceptual definition, we need to evaluate the more general
qualities of the measures.
3. What are your thoughts on the structure, format, etc. of the two measures? What is
good, what might need improvement, and what might need to be tossed out or
changed completely? There is no single correct answer for this question, but your
answer should reflect more than simple considerations (e.g., saying there are too
many words is fine, but why? This is just an example, and should not be the sole
basis for your answer).
