Validation of the Sense of Community Coherence Scale for German and Turkish cultures.

Abstract

Sense of community coherence refers to how much a person perceives their communal life as comprehensible, manageable and meaningful. The study's purpose was to validate the Sense of Community Coherence Scale using two distinct groups of university students from Germany and Turkey. The scale was adapted to German and Turkish using the translation-back translation method and examined in terms of several indicators of reliability and validity, including cross-cultural measurement invariance with the data collected from 489 individuals from Germany and 533 individuals from Turkey. The findings exhibited satisfactory psychometric properties; specifically, high reliability, good construct and criterion validity, and partial measurement invariance across cultures were observed. As a result, Sense of Community Coherence Scale was concluded to be reliable and partially valid in the samples of Turkish and German university students. Validation of the German and Turkish forms of the scale is expected to contribute to mental health research and practice for allowing the measurement of how individuals feel about their community in the context of manageability, meaningfulness and comprehensibility. This study can help researchers and practitioners design enhancement, prevention and intervention programmes aiming to increase the community sense of coherence.